Lament
by Solus Nemo
Summary: A series of frightening events is the least of Sam’s worries when he becomes entangled with a strange group of urban explorers—headed straight for a oncementioned childhood legend dubbed The Killing Room. If only it was a legend, after all.
1. One

**Title: **Lament  
**Author: **"Solus Nemo"  
**Summary:** Here is the room in which children's nightmares are born into reality. If you listen closely, you can still hear its evil heart beating.  
**Author's Note:** This is very loosely strung from a dream I had a few nights ago, mixed with my idea for _Ashes to Ashes_. My dream wouldn't have made it to a chapter two and _Ashes to Ashes_ needed a stronger gallop in the start-off. Oh, and should you wonder about these things, I don't think at all like half of the characters I write about in these opening acts. This is also, might I add, an adaptation from the most haunted house in London, 50 Berkeley Square, since the boys seem to want to stay in the old US of A.

Rating for adult language, violence, themes.**  
Disclaimer:** By now you should know that I do not own the television series _Supernatural_ or anything affiliated with it – the WB does. I also do not own 50 Berkeley Square, this is merely my way of appreciating a house that has intrigued me so. This story is completely fictional, a some part of it only happened in one of the painfully vivid nightmares I am prone to, and I imply nothing about no one.

**Chapter One ; A Fall From Grace**

_Wyandotte, Oklahoma. 1909._

As complying with the unwritten rule of horror story writing, the storm of the century rolled quickly into the lap of Oklahoma. Two massive low pressure systems converged above the massive wooden pile on Belmont Avenue, right over the classic iron weather vane; it threatened to wash that black rooster swiftly off of its nesting perch faster than any of the southwestern farmers could cheer for the blessed end of drought. But then they would stop cheering, their words would die off with mouths still hanging open as the weather vane rushed toward them, and they would stare with wide, horror struck eyes. Fear growing from their boots like tree roots, the farmers of Wyandotte would be more attached to their dusty crops than ever wished to be. As the black iron rooster charged to them from the head of a giant wall of water, the grimy men (both young and old) would think of Lieutenant Colonel Custer and his army – that foolhardy man in Montana Territory those few years ago, racing down the hill with his Calvary to those Indians, to his last stand. Surely the farmers would realize too late that this was _their_ last stand, would come to that conclusion when the water swept them away along with the summer drought and weather vane. They would be confused, also, when they found that though the wave had struck them they did not get wet.

The farmers would remove their crossed arms from their faces, would look with wary eyes at the plains, and find the black rooster was still resting pleasantly on the roof of 687 Belmont Avenue. They would never know that the man residing in the mansion's attic room had dreamt up the furious storm, that it was still raging about inside his head, and that the poor boy had yet no notion that beyond the windows the night hadn't a cloud in the sky.

Victor Graham's attic chamber had no windows. Unless one of the local farmers dropped by to tell him about the warm night Wyandotte was having, Victor wouldn't have had any idea. That kind of visit was very unlikely, though, so much so it was bound to never happen. Only three people in the entire town, let alone world, had known that Victor had survived beyond age ten (the birthday in which his brain had stopped growing). Since his parents had died ten and fifteen years ago respectively, only Victor's older brother held the knowledge of the life of a man living in the highest room in the wood and plaster mansion. The tallest room, fit beyond its door with a narrow bed, a bedpan and a single book – worn to the point of shedding pages – but not a single window. Sixteen hours a day Victor was locked into this chamber, only able to tell between two hours of the day when a key fumbled in the lock on his door. To him the super storm in his mind might as well have been a real one, he wouldn't have believed the words of a farmer telling him the night was clear as diamonds.

Because he had been locked in his attic room sixteen hours a day for twenty-five years, Victor also wouldn't have rung truth from the farmer telling him the sun had been out and blazing earlier in the day. To Victor, who was only allowed to descend into the living parts of the house at night, the sun was a myth. Not able to remember the soft feel of its warmth, the crisp stinging of its bite, Victor had written off all of the photograph suns and the painting suns hidden throughout the mansion as the stuff of Greek legend. But he knew the moon all too well, from the soft curves of its face to its deepest secrets, and tonight he had met up with it again.

At nine o'clock each night, long after the sun set and visitors were rare, Victor was allowed to leave his attic room and wander about the house – but never leave it, _never_. To make sure that most important rule was never chanced to be broken, his older brother Richard made sure to lock every door leading to the outside world and hid the keys away. Richard did this for his brother's own safety, so Victor wouldn't get himself lost or hurt of worse. Victor would thank him profusely for that, also for unlocking his chamber door promptly at nine o'clock each and every evening.

This night, when Victor had heard the familiar scraping of lock and key, he had turned from his scratched wall art and smiled. Stepping over his beaten novel, softly humming his favorite childhood folk song, Victor had waited as the squat door swung inward. The hand clasping the English-style doorknob was a familiar one, one with the scent of soap and spice, and Victor gaily tapped his fingers together.

When the door opened far enough for Richard's head to appear, bathed in the light from Victor's lone candle, the younger man had waved happily. Richard, looking into the room with his age worn face, had shifted his stern face into a smile.

"Richie. 'Lo."

The man with the greying hair had begun to turn around, leaving the door fully opened and pressed against the attic room's south facing wall. "Hello, Victor. Made more art today, have you?"

Victor had blown out his candle and scuttled over to the door, started down the steep steps waiting on the other side of the jamb. "Yes! I made one of the horses in your paintings." He had smiled, his flat eyes glossy.

When he had walked down the staircase to the second floor, Victor had run off the the library. He did that every night, choosing a new (but just as broken) book to bring up to his room and sitting in a chair by the window. For four hours Victor would stare out into the vast Oklahoman twilight, wondering what it would have been like to have been born normal – to have been able to go out into that night and dance in the summer parched hay fields. For four hours he would stew like most children do. Four hours would go by in one pass of the grandfather clock's ancients hands, with Victor settled in his chair and gripping his brittle book so tightly parts of its cover turned to dust in his hands. Four hours, one magestic chorus of "why?"s wafting across the black velvet sky, crescendoing with a hundred voices just as the storm in Victor's head peeled back the roof of the wooden pile on Belmont Avenue. His other four hours were spent playing, eating, exploring the house, frowning at the pictures and paintings that depicted myths.

Richard would come out of his bedroom at five o'clock in the morning, never a minute before of after. Victor knew enough to come to his brother's bed chamber five minutes before the ceremonial door opening, all ready to go for another sixteen hour run in the attic room. Without any words, the Grahams would move up toward the tallest peak of the house, each alone with their vastly different thoughts. More often than not Victor's "why?"s would come back to him. He would follow his brother with a shuffling gait, head down, wondering why his brother must have things so far better than he.

Why is Richard aloud to sleep in a bedroom in the main part of the house when I am not? Why can't I come down in the daytime like Richard? Why am I not allowed to set a foot beyond the foyer when Richard does every day, when Richard _goes outside_ all of the time? Why must I be held up in my drafty chamber when I've done nothing wrong? Why must I be hidden away when company comes, and why can't I ever meet them? Why I am being treated so much like a chicken in a cage? I cannot lay eggs, I cannot brawk, I cannot flap my wings for I have none!

The cacophony would be at its highest when Victor would follow his brother to the stairs. They were small and steep, stretching and twisting up to the promise of days worse than death, but Victor never protested. Eyes on his feet he would wind up and around behind Richard, who jangled one single key on a brass ring obnoxiously. Thirty, that was the number of stairs it took to reach the flat, curving landing of the main attic off to the brother's right, how many seconds during which the metallic jingling was momentarily ceased. The moon was waning, but there was still enough light to get another (and symmetrical acquiring, being as how they recieved one going down) kiss on the cheek before the Grahams ascending the ten remaining steps to the foreboding attic room. Richard started shaking the key noisily about its ring again.

The landing was short, its girth nothing special, but even so Richard moved aside to let his handicapped brother through the chamber door. When Victor went in, scuffling his shoes against the hardwood floor, the elderly man began to pull on the knob to the door of the inner sanctum.

"Richie? Hey, Richie."

He raised his head and stopped moving the door, eyebrows raised and inquiring.

Victor had his shoulders raised, head down and staring at the old candle in its waxy tray. "If I should have another bad dream, Richie?"

With his left hand, the one not on the doorknob, Richard motioned toward a long black chord with a fraying red tassel in the corner of the room by the door, it was attached to a bell on the wall outside of the room.

"If you don't hear it, Richie? If you don't come?" Victor moved anxiously on his feet, looking at his brother with wide eyes – wide, flat, glossy eyes that hinted at something deeper, darker.

"I always come," Richard reply softly, lovingly. "Good morning, Victor, and don't neglect your candle."

The man-child moved his gaze to the candle again, scowled deeply, and squatted down onto his haunches to light it quickly. "G'morning," he said into the strengthening flame. Smartly, Victor picked up his recently apprehended book from its spot on the floor in which he put it to light the candle, and walked in determined steps to the bed.

Richard re-commenced the closing of the door, saying a "I love you, Victor" to the small gap in the jamb before shutting it all of the way. With his key, Richard locked the door and tested it, walking back down the wooden spiral staircase when he couldn't turn the knob. He was about to cross through the door to the second floor when he heard several quick yanks on the servant's bell. Richard turned around, looking up into the slowly lightening darkness of the stairs, and was met by Victor's horrendous, blood chilling screams.

&&&

_Wyandotte, Oklahoma. Present day._

Looking out of the dingy windows of the house it was a calm, quiet night on all fronts. There wasn't a cloud in the oil trough above the trees, the moon and billions of little stars in the sky lit up the first snow of the season like white fire. The leafless oak trees, taller than God, were sprinkled with powdered sugar and the rose bushes, though they were more overgrown weeds, shone like a beacon across the grounds.

Yes, the night landscape surrounding 687 Belmont Avenue might have been called beautiful if the house itself didn't have a busted heater. Those dingy windows, they leaked, and cold drafts waltzed into the rooms through the ancient rat holes. The lights flickered and buzzed, like the wiring could actually feel the winter air, and there was no wood to light the old stove with. The house, slanting on its foundation and slowly falling apart, could really ruin a Robert Frost kind of moment.

Even if the building had been pristine, however, all the Frost poems in the world wouldn't have been able to erase the stories surrounding the house, the stories that kept sensible people out and the party-hearty folks in.

One of those party-hearty folks, a blonde boy, scoffed. Sitting at an old and busted table in the building's kitchen with his two male friends, he folded his poker hand and looked across the piece of furniture to one of his crewcut buddies. "You expect me to believe all those stories, don't you? You really think I'm going to humor you by acting all scared, shaking all over and saying I won't do it anymore? Let me tell you something, Marv, you're not worming me out of two hundred big ones."

The kitchen, it was obvious to tell, had at one point in time been the talk of the town. It was huge, with its wood burning stove still sitting peacefully in a nearby corner, though its cupboards were now a dingy, greenish red (in its hay day probably the color of wine in the sunlight). All the appliances were gone, but when they had been in the kitchen it was evident there had been a lot of them, and the claw foot tub that the yesteryear folk used was out on the porch – cracked, yellowed, choked with weeds, but quietly hinting to its past life as a funky pot for vibrant flowers. The floor was ghastly, a non original white tiling that had gone black and red and green and orange with stain and rot. The rickety dining-turned-poker table with its only three chairs (a person could chance sitting in, that was) were the only furnishings left in the once grand room.

"I'm not worming you out of anything," Marvin replied in a naturally shrill voice. "I just thought you might want to know what the fuck you're getting into before you go up there."

The third of the party, a brownish red head littered with freckles, laughed and shook his head. "Fine time to tell him you can't pay up, man."

"I can so pay up," Marv said indignantly. "Two hundred bucks, that's nothing. You're not going to be able to do it anyway," he directed at the blonde. "You really want your skin shorn off, Craig? I don't think Jenny'll like that very much, banging a skinless fag."

Craig rolled his eyes. "That's all bullshit. I can't believe you're stupid enough to believe all that. Oh, no," he added mockingly, "the lights are flickering. The monster's gonna come and eat me, gonna lock me away in that attic room and eat me." He waved his hands in the air, mouth open wide in a silent scream.

Overtly unamused, Marv set down his royal flush and smirked. "Go ahead and do it, then, ya fuckin' fag. You've been sitting there, talking about it for a half hour now and you haven't even moved your left ass cheek. _Go ahead and do it_ if you're so man enough." He arched his left eyebrow and leaned back in his creaky chair with his arms crossed over his chest. It was a trademark move, so much so that the people in town were positive Marvin Deepneau had done it since the womb. There was a hefty betting pot in the public high school that the kid even slept in that pose – if only someone could actually remember to bring the camera to the boys nights.

"You're the tits, Marv," Craig complimented sarcastically. "The absolute tits." He was hissing as he pushed out his chair and stood up, absentmindedly brushing potato chip crumbs from his jeans. "This will be the easiest two hundred bucks I've ever made. Christ, blinking is harder."

The dirty red haired boy, naturally not wanting to get into anything involving sides, weakly threw up his arm toward the north wall. "Remember to ring the servant's bell once if you need something, two quick jabs if you're in trouble."

Craig shook his head, smiling wryly. "If I'm in trouble, like, serious trouble, man, how am I suppose to ring the bell twice? I might have my skin eaten by the time I yank the cord once."

That was why dirty red, a poor kid dealt the name Till (his family was _Scottish_, for crumbs sake, nowhere near the alps), rarely talked. "How are we suppose to know you're in trouble, dude, if you don't right the damn bell?"

Craig flipped his friend off and turned to Marv. "Get ready to pony up, sucka."

"Just shut the fuck up and do it already," Marv replied hastily.

Taking his hoodie from the back of the chair he had been sitting in, poorly hanging it over his too large sweatshirt, Craig ran out of ways to buy time. He sighed – tried to make it one of those "I don't give a rat's ass about this shit" kind of sighs – and turned to the kitchen doorway. "The whole rest of the night, huh? If the monster ain't gonna kill me, the boredom will."

"We'll be sure to fix you up with a fitting eulogy, then," Marv said happily. "But until then, you pussy, get your ass moving!"

"I'm going, I'm going."

Putting his hands into his black, Nine Inch Nails hoodie pockets, Craig tugged down on it. He cast a long look at Till, sitting there and sucking on a pretzel stick like it was a cigarette, and shot his best friend Marv a look of total self-satisfaction.

"Try not to go blind while I'm gone," he suggested, making a gesture with his hand. "I know how lonely you get without me."

Marv sneered. "Don't be obscene, cowboy."

Smiling, shaking his head, Craig left the dimly lit kitchen and proceeded to the supposedly haunted attic room. He didn't believe any of it, the whole bit about a demon hiding out up there that kills anyone who goes into the room, but if was going to be getting two hundred bucks out of sitting up there like an idiot….

There was a long hallway off of the kitchen, serving both the dining and powder rooms. The dining room sat in the milky light of the moon – crystal chandelier laying shattered on the floor in a pool of dust, all but one of its stone tears gone and sold for drug money. It was barren of dining furniture save one splintered chair, resting in front of a torn section of yellowed wallpaper. The powder room, across the hall to Craig's left, sat behind a crooked door. The toilet had been ripped from its bearings, all the tiles were chipped or completely missing from the floor, and you could wait a million years but the sink would keep pumping brown sludge. It was like something from a bad crack film, that half bath.

The hallway drained into what might have been a formal sitting area, but was now an orgy pit. It stunk of sex, the walls even seemed to be dripping with it, and Craig wouldn't have touched the musty couches or bean bag chairs with a sterilized barge pole. Hell, he would have bet that just breathing in the air in the room would get you some screw ball STD. He peeled back his upper lip, seeing too many stains on too many surface areas to be even the least bit comfortable. Craig wasn't a prude, but he would never "do it like they do on the Discovery channel" on old, stained, sex reeking furniture either. This house had been abandoned since the 1970s, God knew what when on in this room _then_.

Through the orgy – and _things that must not be spoken of_ – pit and into the front hallway. The floor, a once beautiful rose wood, was now burdened with scratches down to its very heart. In places were an ogre with a grudge hadn't taken house keys to it, the wood panels were faded or bleached from burnt alcohol, some spots ripped up altogether. It was a pity, but the tagged walls more so. Gangs had come to this wooden pile on Belmont Avenue to leave their mark (or to annihilate the calling cards of their rivals), kids had professed their love (or intense hate), where others still sold themselves or others, like girls named Jamie or guys named Nick. Compliments ("Tom's hung like a fucking moose") and insults ("Steph's the worst lay I ever had"), peace ("'People are people'") and those against it ("Death to crackers!"). It was a melting pot for the world as it stood today. It was beyond depressing, so Craig quickly moved away and to the stairs.

The treads creaked loudly, the risers were warped and cracked, and the banister wobbled. Beside Craig all the way up to the second floor were the discolored signs of where family portraits used to hang. In the olden days, men and women from the old country were proudly displayed here for all to see, then in the latter kid's football games and reunions and vacations. Now it was nothing more than a grey and peeling, ghostly memorial to lives once lived.

On the second floor now Craig, tensing up when he put too much pressure on the landing and caused it to shriek, began to head to the far end of the narrow hallway. He passed by bedrooms, their doors open with yanked-from-street-curbs-or-the-local-landfill mattresses sitting in the middle of the floor, sending out signal waves of booze and drugs and more private sex than the formal living room. He walked by a couple of bathrooms; one with a shattered mirror and horrifically lime stained porcelain but in otherwise decent shape, the other looked like it had played victim to an early practice session with the Sex Pistols. There was a library up there as well, a good sized one with tattered drapery and near empty built in shelves. Craig wanted to laugh when he saw a fatally neglected oriental rug, thought of how much his mother would have freaked out if she had ever seen it. Chuckling at the image of Jenna Brady flipping her wig, Craig moved on down the hall.

At the end of the disgraced runway it turned into a T, the long part of it serving what Craig had so recently been gawking at. To the right were the servant's rooms, doused in blackness because one person too many had taken a baseball bat to the lightbulbs and stinking of a kind of unease Craig didn't want to mess with. To the left, shot with dingy, blinking light, was the entrance to the attic. The door seemed to be missing, but traces of it still remained, as if a beast had tried to rip the thing from its hinges and succeeded in doing so, yet left behind a few splinters still clinging to life on the hinge pins. Craig didn't like that image, of some ungodly creature snarling and pulling a door away from its home, but he couldn't back out because of that.

"Two hundred bucks, baby," he told himself softly, "two hundred bucks."

With a deep breath Craig turned left, sprinted as fast as he could while still being macho through the kidnapped door, and didn't stop until he was a good ten or fifteen steps up the staircase. There it had turned enough to hide the ragged remnants of attic door, making the image leave Craig's "pacific oceanic green eyes" (as Jenny liked to call them) but the more important bodily organ, his mind. He stood on the steps, absently leaning against the wall – it was brown in spots, he certainly wouldn't have consciously touched it – and tried to bring his breathing back to a normal pace. He was huffing and puffing, not at all a good thing thing to do with his "ass-mar" (_Lord of the Flies_ was Jenny's favorite book, sue him for being a lovestruck teenager). Usually he never needed his fast acting inhaler, not after all those years of having been told by his parents that most of the sickness was in his head and not his windpipe, but for safe measure Craig patted his back pocket to make sure it was there. It was, cool beans, and it helped Craig relax

(_That's the key thing really, Mom says. Relax, keep calm, and you've won half the war._)

enough to take in deep, even breaths. When his heart stopped pounding, when his throat wasn't going to be seizing up on him, Craig opened his eyes and dropped his shoulders from his ears. He pressed the back of his head against the old plaster wall behind him, and worked on willing himself up the stairs to the so-called haunted attic room.

"Buff up, beef cakes," he whispered in the tell-tale tone of a man who talks to himself far too often. "You're a Brady. Not a Tom Brady, unfortunately, but a Brady all the same. Don't blow the fucking play, man."

Chewing on his lip – something stress releasing to do while his eyes were open – Craig looked up the stairs. They seemed in a lot better shape than the rest of the house, the steps and working lightbulbs at least, and so the blonde with the pacific ocean green eyes and ass-mar started up them again with the great confidence of not falling through them, the steps.

After another fifteen to twenty steps, Craig came to the last stop on the party train. The attic, to the right of the sweeping porch he was now on, was another orgy pot or drug hang out or gang shooting gallery. It was lit softly and eerily from the moon through the windows, which were either broken (making the stairwell bearably chilly) or so dirty they might as well have been knocked out. He stood standing on the last refuge before an attic room surrounded by creep-out stories, looking into the storage area in front of him with squinted eyes. In the gauzy gloom he couldn't make out much of anything, a few boxes here and there, some trunks, an old fainting couch, and he sighed. Sweeping his eyes to the left as he turned his head, Craig registered mundane attic floor or wall until a figure leapt out at him silently as a cat.

Craig's scream caught in his throat as he jumped backward, waving his arms in the windmill motion the geeks use when fighting, and came perilously close to losing his footing and falling all the way back down the stairs to the ravaged attic door – meeting it with a hammered in skull and hemorrhaging brain. He sputtered helplessly as he waited for a knife to be driven into his chest, for hands to wrap around his neck and twist, for a bullet to bore into his head, but nothing like that ever came.

His heart racing, legs shaking, and forearms crossed and raised to protect his face, Craig soon got to wondering what was taking the stranger so long to kill him. Maybe he had a bad leg, or emphysema, or something and had to take it slow. Well, that was fantastic, it only added to the heart-stopping terror Craig had been plunged into. But several moments passed, a minute and then two, without anything happening. No freak with a chainsaw and hockey mask came lumbering toward him to slice off a limb, and that got Craig thinking about his better judgment. Slowly lowering his arms, opening one eye and then the other, Craig looked out into the stairwell and attic before him with bated breath and a severe wince etched into his face.

Nothing. There was no one in this part of the stairwell or what part of the attic he could see, no one anywhere other than he himself. It was a spooky conclusion, one that made him snap around to look down the stairs and whiz back forward to look up them. Still nothing, still no one. But he had been positive that someone or something had lunged out at his face, he didn't just imagine it. Craig Brady might have been the asthmatic head of the golf club, but he didn't suffer from delusions.

He dropped his arms, perplexed, and huffed loudly – glad to be alive yet frustrated for not being dead. Taking hesitant steps to the storage area of the attic, Craig felt his heart try to break free of its rib cage binds. He swallowed thickly, hands shaking, stomach in knots, and brought himself to the exact position he had been standing in when the thing popped out at him. Looking right to left, slowly and thoroughly, Craig was feeling rather stupid and calming down – that was, until he was being jumped on by the shadowy figure again.

Yelping, Craig started to throw weak, malformed punches in the direction of the freaky stranger. He began to move forward, forward, until his fists met some kind of cloth-y material, driving him to punch with more fervor. With his eyes shut, yelling meekly, Craig tried to bash the thing into oblivion until it slowly teetered over and crashed to the floor. It was heavy, whatever it was, and make an odd hollow, metallic sound as it met the floor.

Smiling, filling with pride, Craig opened his eyes. He laughed – "yeah-ha" – and made to spit on what had tried to attack him. But then some meanie came along and took a pin to his pride balloon because, looking down in the direction of the thud, Craig realized he had killed an old fashioned clothes model.

"Oh, _shit_."

Craig felt like an ass and hooked the left side of his upper lip. Craig _was_ an ass, a stupid ass who just attacked an even stupider clothes model. But still…. He ran up the half dozen or so steps to the enigmatic attic room, pulled the short and very heavy wood door closed behind him, and stood in the dark shivering with paranoia.

Moaning and wheezing like a donkey for several minutes, forehead pressed against the door, Craig counted himself as safe. If there _had_ been someone in that attic, betting on Craig to assume that the only harmful thing in there was the model, waiting in the shadows and creeping up on him with a dagger in hand ready to slice Craig like a pig and spill his – Craig quickly spun around and clawed blindly at the room behind him. He kept his back pressed firmly against the wall, _pushed_ his body into it like he'd pass through the thick slab of wood, and clawed and kicked and spat at the darkness.

He eased his nerves down considerably by delving into his fit and, eventually, Craig had enough of his schizoid actions. Confident that if there was someone out there he couldn't get in without Craig knowing about it, he stopped trying to pass through the door like a ghost. Laughing at himself, though it was strained and uncomfortable, Craig took his flashlight from the back pocket of his jeans not housing his inhaler. Turning on the torch, focusing its beam slowly about the room, he sighed at what he saw.

Craig was going to be spending the night in a tiny room with a hard and most likely freezing hardwood floor, with no lighting system and without a stick of furniture. It was covered in a foot of dusty, absent in some spots and built up in others (caused by other visitors he was sure), and there were old paper scraps scattered all over the place. Again he sighed, studying these dismal surroundings.

He made sure to check where the servant's bell was, in a corner of the room behind him, and walked three or four steps into the middle of the room. Craig didn't want to have to sit down on the floor, but the ceiling was better suited to anyone less than his six feet and four inches. He considered stooping until his legs and back simply couldn't take it, but then he noticed something off to his upper right. He pointed his flashlight beam at it and chortled. It was book, a very old and extremely ragged book, covered in an inch of dust. Craig went over to it, meaning to pick it up and page through it (he was a slow reader and it was a thick book, he'd just about finish it when the clock timed for him to leave) when he noticed some etching in the wall in front of him.

When Craig came in, when he first ignited his electric torch, he hadn't been paying attention to the walls. But now, pointing the bright beam outward and turning around in a small, slowly forming circle, he was a little creeped out to say the least.

Someone – maybe the same someone waiting for him in the storage area – had taken a sharp object to the wood paneled walls of the room. All four of the walls and, now that he was looking for it, parts of the floor and the ceiling right above his head were covered in drawings. Most were just crop circle-like things, doodles that meant absolutely nothing in human, but others stabbed Craig in the heart with unease greater than the servant room wing on the second floor. People, animals, buildings, random objects like baseballs and buggies, and they were all drawn by someone with a child's hand. Not a child himself, not with arcs of death spread across the walls, but by someone with a young hand; the lines were shaky and the drawings premature, but the subject matter was more grown-up than the majority of adults wandering the world.

Shuddering, Craig walked over toward the door and stood in front of the servant's bell. It was a moldering black chord (braided velvet, maybe) with a red tassel that seemed on its last breath. Glad that it was still there, though it was most likely going to disintegrate when and if Craig ever pulled it, he set his flashlight on the floor and took off his hoodie. Setting it in the corner just below the bell pull, Craig sat down on it and picked up the flashlight again. For a long moment he stared at the book, but then decided against it; he didn't want to read it, not if it belonged to whoever dolled up the walls like they did. So, leaning back to rest his head against the wall, Craig reached an arm up – he could reach the black chord with inches to spare – and then dropped his hand back into his lap. He shut his flashlight off, not wanting to have to look at the decorations on the wall, and settled himself in for a long stay.

He hadn't been there long when something roused him from his contentment, when something interrupted his singing recitation of one of the older Death Cab for Cutie albums. That pissed Craig off slightly, being cut off like that in the middle of "405", and he was about to voice his annoyance when he snapped his jaw shut.

Craig was alone… alone was Craig… but that noise had come from _inside_ the room.

Starting to wind himself up again, Craig looked to the door. It was only a raven's width away from his right shoulder and it was an old heavy door, surely he would have known if someone had come in. And he had looked around the room, there wasn't a microphone or tape player hidden anywhere, was there? He didn't think so. It couldn't have been in the book, not with the dust on and around it undisturbed. Christ, he was just a kid trying to make a couple hundred bucks, he didn't need to keep freaking out like this. His heart couldn't take much more of this and neither could his asthma.

"Sucks to your ass-mar," he mumbled under his breath, trying to calm his animalistic heart and racing mind. "Sucks to your–"

Craig's flashlight clicked on by its own means, sending a bright white cone of light off in front of him. He screamed, but not because his electric torch was flicked on by something other than him. He screamed because of the _something_ standing before him. It wasn't of this world, wasn't from heaven and sure wasn't from hell – even hell would spit something like _that_ away like a rancid peppermint. It was hideous beyond words, slimy and black and tall and red eyed and foaming at a mouth that seemed to only be hanging on by one jaw joint and it's teeth – oh god, it's teeth!

Still screaming, his throat turning into something much rawer than blisters that have burst, Craig tried to swing his hands up toward the servant's bell chord. He couldn't take his eyes off the thing in front of him, oozing from open sores and sweating something puss green with a smell fouler than sulfur. And it was starting to bend down.

Craig Brady was allowed the ability to wrap one hand around the – yes, it was – braided velvet chord, but not the chance to pull down on it once, let alone twice.


	2. Two

**Chapter Two ; Nothing is Safer than Death**

There was a wonderful business to be made spiking cholesterol through the roof, clogging enough arteries to make hundreds candidates for quadruple bypass surgery and, of course, loading people with so many extra pounds they could easily go into hibernation. It was a billion dollar a day industry, slowly killing people, and judging by the amount of people crammed daily into fast-food restaurants most didn't seem to mind. As long as the food was greasy and delicious, as long as there were free refills on drinks, Dean Winchester didn't seem at all fazed by the statistics. His younger brother Sam, on the other hand, had a look in his eye that said quite clearly, "Can't we just get a salad _once_?"

Samuel "Sammy" Winchester sat in a Diary Queen booth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, staring down at his double cheeseburger and basket of large fries with apprehension painted all over his face. It wasn't that he was a health nut – not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway – but he also didn't want to drop dead by the time he hit forty. Adolescent metabolism didn't last very long in this world and when the race started to slow down, all of those chili dogs and cheese steaks were going to catch up to him with a vengeance. But he couldn't deny the pull of "unhealthy" food, wasn't about to turn his nose up when that cheeseburger smelt so good, when the look of it alone was enough to make him salivate like Pavlov's dogs at the sound of the ringing bell.

A woman laughed, an angelic sound that reminded Sam of tinkling sleigh bells at Christmastime, and so he looked up to acknowledge his company. He smiled widely at her, at the blonde beauty sitting in the booth seat across the table from him, and out of nervous habit brought a hand to his shaggy brown hair. That made the girl laugh again and lean forward, put a warm and delicately soft hand on his arm.

"You still act like you did on our first date," she told him, her voice confident and loving. "It makes me wonder when you're going to tuck the table cloth into your belt and get up to use the bathroom."

Sam started to blush and lowered his head shyly, studying the hand on his arm. Her thumb was rubbing his skin gently, making the light from the fluorescent bulbs overhead refract off of the blue polish on the long nail. The enamel was the color of the Smurfs' skin on her night shirt, coated on without modesty and top glossed to a high sheen. She had done it herself, but no one would have guessed; Jessica was a perfectionist when it came to painting her nails, would sit there until it was done right and sometimes started over two or three times. It was one of her quirks and Sam loved her for it.

She squeezed his arm lightly, bringing his attention back to her. "You dumped food and hot coffee all over me and the head waiter, the whole night was in itself a disaster, but the company made every second worth it. I thought you were too thin then, and you still are, so go ahead. If you get love handles and some thunder thighs it's only more of you to love… besides, I'll eat it if you don't."

Jessica took her hand away to cross her arms, push her weight forward with elbows on the table. Her hair was down, waving in its own mild wind, and as usual she wasn't wearing any make-up – she didn't need it. Full lips parted into a sad smile, she put her head to the side and took her boyfriend in with depressed eyes. She looked like a misplaced old Hollywood movie actress when she made expressions like that, which wasn't often. "I miss you, Sam."

Nodding pathetically, Sam scrabbled over across the table to cup the side of her face with his hand. _"Jess. Oh, Jess, I miss you too."_

Her sigh was inaudible, but it darkened the restaurant all the same as she kissed the inside of Sam's wrist. "I'm proud of you, know that, Sam. Even though you've never told me about your true life, I'm so proud of you."

There was a glow around her now, a soft and comforting halo of light that had an adverse effect on Sam. Instead of feeling glad, knowing that his love wasn't stuck on earth and unable to move on to wherever it was we moved on to, he felt broken. _"I didn't want to lose you, Jess, that's why I never told you. I'm sorry."_

Jessica laughed again, though it was anguished, and the sky outside became filled with black thunderheads. "Silly, kid, you never would have lost me. I love you, babe, and, yeah, I would have been a little freaked out but I never would have left you. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you're stuck with me."

Sam smiled weakly, feeling horrible for being unsure of her words.

"Samuel Winchester, have I ever let you down? I would've been the anxious housewife, calling you every hour on the hour to make sure you were doing all right. I even would have made your lunches, in paper sacks with your name printed neatly on the outside with a short note clipped to the sandwich. Little things, you know, but the message would have been big enough." She nuzzled his hand. "Like, 'Hurry up, sweetcakes, before your fries get cold and soggy, signed Jess with a heart and lipstick kiss'."

"_I love you, Jessica."_

Suddenly her face changed. It was no longer soft and loving, but hard, cold and angry. Outside, silent white-blue bolts of lightning reached with stretching fingers from one cloud to another. Taking her head away from Sam, Jessica waved a hand impatiently at him and shook her head. When she started to speak, her voice had the unsettling quality of a vinyl record being played backward – fluctuating, a-tonal, demonic in the old horror movie sense. "Liar!" she screamed at him, her eyes no longer mournful but alive with rage.

Sam pulled his hand away from her, bewildered. _"Jess, I–"_

Pounding her Nordic fists on the table, Jessica screamed "LIAR!" once more before bursting into flame. The wall of heat was immense, knocking into Sam with all the force Russ Hochstein must pack during every New England Patriot's game, shoving him backward into the blue vinyl booth. All the air in his lungs was sucked out of him by the blast, so there he sat unable to breathe and watched horror-struck as Jessica burned away from him for the hundredth time since her death.

Unlike usual, however, Jessica wasn't fixed from movement as she went back – albeit reluctantly by the look of it – to that from which she came. As it burned away from her head, those ethereal blonde locks swung back and forth through the ball of flame as Jessica thrashed her head; the strands, one by one yet in no methodical order, turned to black and fell from the only thing that had ever been beautiful in the world. Her poor face, Sam had to turn from because he couldn't stomach the sight of something he had loved so much melting – not just charring black and flaking back to bone, but _melting_ and _bubbling_ for Christ's sake. But unfortunately, Sam could still see his beloved clear as day through his closed eyes and upraised hands.

Screenwriters with an affinity for terror had nothing on Samuel Winchester. Surely there was no way anyone else could have turned beauty to beast in such a smooth motion, have a monster now sit before the kid with too big of hopes and horribly styled hair in place of his first (and quite possibly only) love. It had her voice, though, the monster. Within its coat of flame, the nightmarish remnant of a human was still thrashing about and screaming in such a high pitch its words were almost inaudible. _Almost._

"Liar, liar! You don't love me! Liar, liar!"

The screaming was so loud, in fact, that Sam was convinced that if it didn't stop anytime soon his brain would split down the middle from all the rattling it was going through. If that didn't happen, then the whole of him might shatter for a better dramatic effect.

"_Jess, please, I didn't–"_

Something grabbed his arm, something hot enough to burn his flesh and strong enough to simultaneously wretch his hand from his face and turn him around. Sam yelped like a kicked dog.

"Look at me!" the impostor yelled in Jessica's stolen voice, Sam suddenly wishing to hear that creepy, demonic movie recording again instead.

Sam wasn't dealing with his Jessica anymore, not by a long shot, for she had left somewhere between the first liar accusation and the beginning of the flames. The real Jessica, to be completely exact, had gone away all that time ago in the apartment and now the figment of her had exited stage right as well. Whatever Sam was playing Russian Roulette with now had come straight from the guilt diseased swamp in the pit of his heart and, sitting there in a Tulsa Diary Queen staring at the _thing_ in front of him, Sam had to agree that guilt was indeed a very ugly thing. Such a ghastly sight as to cause Sam's stomach to churn and make him very glad he hadn't decided to eat the rest of his cheeseburger.

"You never loved me."

His brother Dean had always been bullheaded about pleading, constantly telling Sam that that was what cowards do (they'll never be taken seriously again and, really, how can your life be important enough to save if you have to beg and plead for it?)… but at least Sam wasn't crying.

"_Yes, I did! Jessica, I'd still give my life to have you back, I _love _you. I had to lie to you, though, and I'm so sorry for that. Jess, I just didn't want you to get hurt – I thought I could keep you safe if I never told you about that part of me."_

If he had needed a final clue that Jessica was long gone, the laughter certainly would have been it. The demon that had destroyed Sam's life so with something as simple as flame, it was showing itself more than ever in the mangled remains of his girlfriend through that laughter.

"Well, you definitely did that, didn't you? Led the little bitch right to me, Samuel, because you know that nothing is safer than death."

All of Sam's revulsion seemed to be sucked into the flame, as if it was the oxygen the greedy engine of murder needed to keep going. Finally able to look right into it, stare down into the very core of this dream of evil, Sam watched with wide eyes, about to say something rather ungentlemanly, as the fire ball burst up with new life and faded away into the restaurant ceiling. It left no physical trace of its visit anywhere, hadn't so much as scorched the vinyl booth seat on its way out. The sky outside of the picture windows had even voided itself of any stormy conditions.

Jerking in delayed reaction, Sam twisted in his seat and clamped his eyes closed, tried to slow his breathing. He also rubbed his right forearm, feeling the shape of a hand burn down to his bone, though he knew that if he looked nothing of the sort would be found. Sighing at that realization, Sam dared himself to look around the restaurant.

It was after eight at night, apart from him there was only a solemn-looking and heavy trucker sitting in a booth near the children's toy area – a building table that was littered with green and yellow and red legos, but no little boy or girl was hiding out there. The ice cream cases stood forty or so feet from the register counter on the other side of the dividing wall between service and eating areas, shining with the temptation of ice cream cakes and Dilly Bars. But no one was yet pulled to those cases like a mosquito to bright light. A few teenage employees mulled around in the prep area, eating their dinners or talking to each other about how high school was going.

Confused (the last thing Sam remembered was a cotton candy dusk beyond the Dairy Queen's windows), he started looking around for his brother. The only sign that Dean had ever been sitting in the booth was the small piece of paper he had ripped from his ice cream cone, plunked down on the table a few inches in front of the tray holding Sam's half eaten food. Surely the burger and fries were ice cold now, so even if Sam had regained his appetite it wouldn't have been very pleasant to consume. Head swimming, not aware of when he had nodded off and when he had actually woken, Sam scooted out of his booth and got to his feet. He gathered the tray and slip of paper Dean had littered with, then walked to the wooden trash can houses and emptied the garbage into one. Plopping the navy blue plastic tray on top of the honey stained wood between the markers, Sam took a second and slower look around the room.

No Dean and, on the plus side, no one staring at the taller and thinner Winchester brother like he should be carted off to a home either. Apparently Sam had not chosen to scream during his latest night terror – or he had, with the reason not a soul in the restaurant was looking at him because they were terrified of him. Thinking the latter scenario made much more sense, Sam started with pudding legs for the double glass doors that opened into the convenience store the Dairy Queen was attached to.

It seemed as though Sam's brain had overloaded and fizzled out for the time being, what with it being – if anything – horrendously fuzzy. To tell the truth, he was shocked he was able to walk to the BP station doors and stop in front of them without colliding _into_ them. He grinned slightly at his twisted good fortune and put his hands on the black rod cutting width wise across the right hand door, leaning into it in case Sam's balance decided to switch off too.

Slowly if not surely getting over the episode he had so recently had in the booth behind the trash cans, Sam scanned the mini mart through the plate glass of the door he was holding onto. For a while he saw nothing, but then he get a nibble on his line: Dean was standing over by the freshly baked pastries, talking to a minute group of people filling small white bags with icing covered goodies. Sam sighed, seeing how his brother was leaning toward a tall and willowy red-head, grinning like an idiot and laughing at whatever the hell she might have just said. Shaking his head, Sam pushed open the glass doors to the BP station and walked across the clean grey tiles to his brother, muttering under his breath and coming close to forgetting all of what happened in the presence of a half consumed cheeseburger. That double cheeseburger started to ferment in Sam's stomach as his shoes squeaked against the floor.

The convenience store was large compared to most others the brothers had been to, but also not the largest. To his left were the refrigeration units, housing everything from iced tea to T.G.I Friday's buffalo wings – here the cheeseburger might have scoffed and rolled its sesame seed eyes. On his right was an alcove serving the bathrooms and a single pay phone, metal gleaming and blue papered information still clean and crisp. The bakery section was clear on the other side of the store, beyond the books and magazines; the distant cousin to the rental movies and souvenir hats and sweatshirts; in front of the three isles of snack foods and groceries; to the left of the specialty display stand; to the right of the two wire mesh and glass cased goodies (punk jewelry, funky pens, kitchy sculptures, Orange County Choppers tee-shirts, sunglasses, so on and so forth). It was dizzying, all the stuff the store had to offer, and Sam couldn't help thinking how he'd much prefer a pint-sized convenience store that could only afford to sell food, gas, and lottery tickets. Certainly it wouldn't have a Dairy Queen to fuel a demon ridden hallucination.

When Sam had gotten close enough to spit in Dean's face if he chose to, he heard his brother laugh suavely again. He was leaning more toward Red than ever before, who had her back to Sam and was nodding her head and gesturing with her hands. Sam snorted rudely – that poor man's gas station also wouldn't have an infestation of female diversions.

"C'mon, doll," Sam said in a sing-song manner. "It's about time we get going, we don't want to be late in getting to Corpus Christi."

The small group of people turned to face Sam, three folks in all. The only woman was Red, her hair evidently a dye job because of her dark brown eyebrows. There was also a man who looked no taller than five foot six, with strawberry blonde hair cut into a resting mohawk. Beside him, with a finger hooked in one of Red's belt loops, was an intense looking fellow with raven hair down to his shoulders.

Dean, who might or might not have known that the girl he had been flirting with belonged to the Crow look-a-like, grinned broadly at his brother. "Sammy, bro! Hey, I want you to meet these guys."

"_Sam_," he corrected, "and maybe some other time. We have a schedule, you see, and–"

The eldest Winchester brother shook his head, as if to say keeping to time markers was a task better suited to the kids at the loser table at high school lunch. "We have plenty of time, Sleeping Beauty. This won't take two minutes."

_Sleeping Beauty_ pursed his lips, wanting nothing more than to get on the road before he saw the ghost of Jessica again, but he knew the best thing to do in these situations was to humor his brother. "Yeah?"

Dean nodded enthusiastically, obviously excited about something Sam wasn't particularly interested in. "Yeah. While you were passed out in the booth over there, I came out here to get a few provisions for the road and I ran straight into Chuck, there, by the Little Debbie end cap."

Chuck, as pointed out by one of Dean's ruggedly manicured nails, was the man holding onto Red by one of her belt loops. Sam wanted to laugh. The bloke looked nothing like a Chuck – a Vinnie maybe, or a Pauly, or a Frank, but not something as childish and innocent as Chuck. But the newly introduced stranger smiled politely enough for his name and Gothic mob boss look.

"Hey," Chuck offered with a voice darker than molasses. Red visibly quivered with pleasure at the sound and leaned back into her "yous guys are gonna be sleepin' with da fishes" beau.

Sam smiled, nervous-like. In the back of his foggy little mind, he thought that if he didn't smile he really would be sleeping with the fishes.

Dean could have ignored Red's actions. "That's Steve back there and this is Monique," he acknowledged both with his signature smile but it was obvious the gesture was toward Red. "You'll never guess what they do, Sammy."

He couldn't understand why Dean was being so annoyingly happy, it wasn't like him. "It's Sam, and I don't want to. Why don't you tell me?" Something weird was going on at an old railway station in Texas, there wasn't much time to be wasted playing guessing games.

"You're no fun," Dean sighed. He cast a glance at the front counter, at a male cashier busy putting out cartons of cigarettes, and then looked back at his brother. "They're urban explorers, Sammy," he said in a low tone, "and they're going to the old Graham place this week."

Finally Sam had the epiphany he had been looking for – even all the way over in Kansas he remembered hearing about the Graham Mansion at least once as a kid. Rumors, of course, nothing to put aside a haunted railway track for. "They're what?" he asked, looking back at the other three people around him.

Monique smiled, striking Sam as the cat looking through the bars of the canary's cage with the perfect plan for dinner. "You know," she said softly so as not to be overheard by the cashier, "we're Creepers. There's a book out about it now by that Rambo guy."

That Rambo guy? Jessica had been so lucky, being born with both beauty _and_ brains.

"David Morrell, you mean," Sam informed her. "I haven't read it, but one of my good friends back in California used to run around in old tunnels for fun. Sliced his thigh open once, then he just started surfing around those websites you people've made."

Chuck seemed to shift with agitation, like the thought of some half-assed kid doing what he did was unlawful (to his pride, setting aside the fact that Creeping actually was illegal). "We're on our way to Wyandotte," he explained, his black hair shinning something brilliant in the store's lighting system. "There's a house there that's going to be demolished next month, we'd like to take a look at it before another piece of history is destroyed." For some reason, Sam was slightly put aback at how coherently Chuck was able to speak – how sane and unmobbish he could come across.

Monique nodded her head passionately. "It's horrible, how the bureaucrats today are slowly but surely erasing the country's history. What's going to be left for our children, for our children's children?"

Dean shook his head, frowning. "What's going to be left?"

Sam could have laughed, but for the moment he just want to leave this business partnership and hit the road. "That's very nice of you to do but, really, my brother and I ought to be going."

The Casanova in training bumped Sam in the ribs with his elbow, giving him a look as he said, "We could use a _break_, Sammy. We've been driving around for days and this seems rather _interesting_, what with all of the historical _stories_ surrounding the old place. That seems like your cup of tea, doesn't it?" That look, the one still on his face, said something utterly different: _"They used to talk about that house sometimes in school, didn't they, Sammy? Never much, but it had been enough. The Killing Room, Sammy. Remember the Killing Room?"_

How could Sam forget? He had only heard about that house once when he was a child, in the fifth grade, and it had kept him up for two nights. Now, years later, nothing remained of that story in his memory but the name of the room.

"I don't…," he shook his head. "Wyandotte is back the way we came, it'll take too much time off our plans. We have a tight schedule as it is and I don't think it'd be wise to go that far off our trail."

Dean whistled through his teeth, getting exasperated. "I think it's quite wise, Sammy. It'll be like going on a historical treasure _hunt_. You like hunts, don't you, Sammy?"

Sam reluctantly looked back to the group. Steve, checking the contents of his baked goods, started talking to the pastry bag more than to his new found companion. "Yeah," he said with a slight speech impediment that strangely added a kind of puppy quality to his short stature, "it is kinda like a hunting expedition."

"That's all well and good," Sam said, "but what about Corpus Christi, Dean?"

He frowned and shrugged one shoulder. "It'll only be a couple of days, Sammy, those tracks aren't going anywhere."

Monique nodded in approval. "But that house is. It was built in the 1800s, Sam, and the county is going to take the thing down to make room for another strip mall or another sprawling suburb, let the V.F.D have at it for their training like it isn't anything important."

Again, that look from Dean.

"There's too much history in that house," Monique went on, "to let it go without any kind of documentation. Do you have any idea what that building has _seen_, any idea at all?"

Sam blinked, in effect saying, "Oh, I think I have an idea."

That only seemed to rile her up more, sadly. "I'm a history major, Sam, and if you don't want to appreciate this country's past that's damn fine by me, but I didn't come here all the way from Rhode Island to scratch my ass."

Jessica had also been a hell of a lot more lady-like.

"Let me speak to my brother for a second and I'll get right back to you," Sam replied simply.

Dean had evidently thought that he and his brother would talk in front of this new group of people, but that wasn't at all the case. He was momentarily dragged off toward the pay phone by the right lapel of his leather jacket, when Sam had started off and noticed that Dean hadn't begun to follow.

"Watch the goods, man!" Dean huffed, pulling away from his brother by the stocked shelves of breakfast cereals. He looked shortly at a box of reduced sugar Cinnamon Toast Crunch, then straightened his jacket and followed Sam into the men's room. It was a small bathroom, equipped with only two urinals, two sinks and one stall – to a person with symmetry issues the room might drive them insane.

Sam stopped by the sink closest to the urinals and leaned against the counter, arms crossed and looking coldly at Dean. "I shouldn't be surprised, but this is new for you. You run off the best chance you get and give the first girl you see a spiel I don't want to know about just to bang her?" Sam snorted. "At least she's of age, I'll give you that."

Dean looked offended. "You've seen the size of Chuck, Sammy. I happen to like my face the farthest thing from a Picasso painting, thank you very much."

"So then why are you doing this, Dean? I thought we were going to go to California, that as a compromise we're only stopping to check things out if they're high up on the list. Sacrificial deaths by scarecrow, yes. Old railroad stations were people get on a train that vanishes ten feet down the track, I'd think so, but this? Nu-ah. I'm not backtracking all the way to a small town by the state line just because of a few horror stories told around a campfire."

"And I agree with you, Sammy." Dean looked down at his shoes, kicked the heel of one against the grey tile floor, then met his brother's eyes again. "I didn't want to wake you when you fell asleep, so after I finished my ice cream cone I went to the mini mart. I heard them talking about the Graham Mansion when I was paging through a magazine, but they were speaking so softly I had to sneak up to them. Stupidly I wasn't that discreet about it, I didn't actually mean to bump into them. Do you honestly think I _like_ being the history nerd?"

Sam didn't say anything, but his eyes did start to thaw out slightly.

"They aren't from anywhere around here," Dean continued. "Hell, it was a stroke of luck we even heard about the place when we were kids. Those folks are from Rhode Island, Sammy, and all they know about the house is that it's really really old and going to be very big pile of ash very soon."

"The stories have been so embellished over the years I'll bet you, Dean. How do we know that it was really only a cat that died in the room by choking on a mouse, that after so long and so many re-tellings it turned into a hundred and some odd number of idiot thrill seekers?"

Dean shut his eyes, sighed, and when he opened them again he looked oddly defeated. "What if the stories haven't been struck with a case of Telephone-itis?"

Sam rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. "It seems as though lately we've been trading places. Usually I'm the stubborn one pushing you to consider a case. If it's not the girl, what the hell is it?"

When his brother didn't answer, Sam removed his hands from his face. For a moment he received a start, finding himself staring at air where his brother had been only seconds before, but then he spun around and saw Dean reading some writing scratched into the toilet stall's door.

"You're the one with the dreams," Dean stated softly.

Sam watched as his brother traced a symbol etched into the door with his finger, his shoulders slumped forward into a most unlike Dean stance. "I haven't noticed," Sam replied sarcastically, trying to lift the uneasy mood.

Nothing, not even an airy chuckle.

"Alright, who are you and what have you done with my brother?"

The man in front of the lone toilet stall sighed loudly. "Please tell me I'm reading too much into this, but… I think I might have seen something."

Sam pushed himself from the sink, worried. "What do you mean, seen something? Dean, nothing's wrong with you… right?"

"Depends on what you mean by wrong," he replied. "I mean, there's: I ate a bad cut of meat wrong, and there's: I'm seeing little bald doctors with scalpels wrong."

"Dean," Sam said carefully as he walked over to his brother. "I'm sure everything's fine. I mean, you're always going to be a card short of a full deck, but you're not going crazy."

He forced himself to laugh, a foreign sound that Sam wished he could have been saved from hearing, and then turned his head to face his younger brother. "You were starting to nod off into your double cheeseburger when I went to get my ice cream cone, that or you were high but… well, let's face it, you've never been that kind of fun."

Sam scowled. "Is there a point to this other than degrading me?"

"Yeah, I'm getting to it." Dean stared back at the writing on the dark blue stall door again, reading about how George loved Martha or memorizing a number with which he can get a whole lot of fun. "The kid had his back to me, making the twist cone, when I looked up at the menu – I don't know why, whether I was pulled there or I was just getting bored waiting – but that's were I saw it…."

"Saw what, Dean?"

He shook his head, moving away from his brother and back toward the sinks. Dean put both of his hands on either side of the sink on the grey-blue counter top and leaned into it, looking at his face in the mirror. "A pimple. Goddammit, look at the size of the little fucker." Still leaning against the counter, but with his upper thighs now, Dean moved his hands up to his face. Extending both index fingers, rolling back all the other digits useless for the current task, Dean focused on a spot of skin almost hidden beneath his hairline. "Christ, I'm suppose to have perfect skin but, does this look like flawless, model envied skin to you?"

"Stay on track, Dean," Sam called like a man training his dog. "C'mon, bro, tell me what you saw on the menu board back in the restaurant."

Dean's nose was almost pressed against the brightly lit mirror.

"No, Dean, no! God, don't do that in here, you know I'm squeamish when it comes to stuff like that."

The smile on his older brother's face was broad and sly, totally that of Dean Winchester. "I know," he replied mischievously.

Sam rolled his eyes. "I kept telling Dad to put you on Ritalin, but does he ever listen? Tell me what you saw, will you?"

Dean's smile slowly faded into a look of disquiet. "The letters on the board, they… they, uh… changed. I looked up and they were rearranging themselves into other words. Graham Mansion, and below it where the food should have been listed were names. I didn't understand it, but then I came out here and heard those people talking about the same house. Whether the stories are real or not, Sammy, we have to sidetrack the railway for a while and go back to Wyandotte. I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but I really think those nutty Northerners are in trouble."


	3. Three

**Chapter Three ; Foolhardy**

Sam didn't know what to make of the situation, standing in an unsymmetrical bathroom under the harsh glare of florescent lights. He had been handed a tin bucket overflowing with parts to some unknown mechanical device, had been told with a wry smile to flawlessly assemble that machine without a single form of direction. It was impossible without actually _being_ impossible – akin to the notion of eighty people flying all together from Los Angeles to Hawaii in something weighing 375 tons. Like the whole concept of human flight, it took a while for Sam's head to wrap around the concept Dean had unwittingly unleashed.

It was true, Sam was the one who had the dreams; the images behind closed eyelids that had more than one grain of realism to them (the "this is going to happen in X amount of hours" realism pertaining only to premonitions). But what did this revelation mean with Dean? If Sam had his way, nothing. The visual word play in the Dairy Queen had simply been brought upon by sleep deprivation and anxiety. It had taken its toll, driving nonstop from that impromptu church tent and satanic death offering table, going faster than a bat out of hell in desperate hopes that a reaper wouldn't materialize in the car and finish the job it had started. Yes, all the tightly wound emotions gifted by the sadly misinformed "faith healer" Roy Le Grange had exploded from all the tension, the release introducing itself as a twisted game of Scrabble.

The look on Dean's face, however, refracted back to Sam by the mirror, killed whatever conviction the wish might have held.

Dean hadn't stopped leaning against the counter top, was pitched so far forward he appeared to be the male equivalent of Alice (about to pass through the looking glass into the backwards version of her parlor). He was also still looking at that spot of skin by his hairline – more like staring _through_ it – with such a deep frown on his face that it pulled every last one of his premature age lines farther into the Land of Conspicuousy. All right, so that wasn't a word, but the last thing on Sam's mind was using his vast intelligence. The word pathetic, also in the realm of his IQ though lower, no longer had a powerful enough definition, not as long as that violated expression remained on Dean Winchester's ruggedly handsome face – past conquests' words, not Sam's.

"You're the one with the dreams," the blonde repeated, his tone of voice and rhythm an obvious farce to his milk dud of a placid facial mask.

Sam's shoulders drooped, as if all the weight of the world had been placed upon them. "Pardon me for sounding like a therapist, but it could just be a manifestation of some deep seeded psychological issue. You never _did_ manage to kill that werewolf way back when in North Carolina."

It was apparent Dean was too unsettled by what had happened to him to mewl at his brother. "Theoretically, then, I would have flashed up names stored in my subconscious? Abstracts in movies, tv, my old girlfriends…. Sammy, there were no Gomer Pyles or Angie Carvers on that list."

"Dean, after what you went through in the asylum, tied to that tree for the scarecrow, with your heart attack," Sam turned his eyes to the ceiling, "I wouldn't put it beyond you. What I mean is…. It could be stress."

The elder laughed, and like the last time it was a sound his younger brother wished he had been born deaf to. "I saw a reaper beside Roy's shoulder after he healed me, Sammy, and then it turned around and tried to kill me. What that hopelessly faithful blind dude did to me, it wasn't _stress_."

The portrait of fear presented to Sam through the mirror said what the lanky brunette didn't need to repeat. Dean had been afflicted with the kind of freak his little brother was handicapped with – and there was no known cure this time, no faith healer waiting in the wings, and not a single binding spell strong enough to quell its progress.

Sam shifted awkwardly on his feet, shook his head absently in order to move a pesky strand of hair from his right eye. "Do you think this has something to do with that reaper?"

"What, you mean some darkishly woogie thing passing from his palm to my forehead?" Dean mulled that one over for half a minute before turning his head away from the mirror, as if deeply bothered or even frightened of his own face. "No. I don't believe in reaper cooties."

Sam felt slightly hopeless, and it presented itself as hostility and impatience. "Then how do you explain this, Dean?"

"I don't know, I'm not the one who went to college," he sighed and threw up his hands. "This is it, at long last it's happening. Took long enough, but I think I'm finally starting to fly over the coo coos nest."

That thought had passed through Sam's mind many a time as well, when he first started to dance with his fortune telling dreams and began moving pencils without any sort of physical contact. That latter ability had upped the conviction of madness ten fold, and thank God all Sam could do to the utensils was make them wiggle. Actually, it wasn't a form of wiggling at all, but a sluggish to and fro roll (never leaving its place of rest) before the fuses blew. It had begun happening around the time Dean had been thrown into an apple orchard as a Pagan sacrifice and, though it was still in a newborn stage of life, it was strong enough to give him a heated case of the heebee jeebies. Sam didn't all too much like finding the motel pen he had been staring at in the middle of the night turn around ninety degrees on a mint green stationary pad. If the Jessica nightmares hadn't been wacky enough to keep him up an extra three hours, _that _certainly had been.

Dean turned around, looked at his college boy as if expectant of an answer that would put to rest any other question pertaining to his, Dean's, decent into insanity. "I really hope the next thing to happen to me isn't a run in an owl impression championship. I'd rotate my head in circles around that little Linda Blair."

A fisherman snagged his hook on Sam's upper lip, tugged hard and sent the left side of it up into an Elvis Presley jeer. "That was horrible, Dean, even for you."

"Forgive me. Somehow having a brush with lunacy has killed my sense of humor," he replied coolly. Visibly shrinking down to the height of a lawn gnome, Dean's chest heaved in a muted sigh.

Sam nodded, not in any sort of response to what his brother had said or in recognition to the mirror conversed words key scratched into the toilet stall door. But it was in such a controlled, puppet-esque way he might not have meant to nod at all. "You'll be all right," he said hollowly. On some level the pitch of his voice, in company with those words, scared him.

"Yeah," Dean agreed in almost the same manner. "'All right' on the Winchester scale of things."

Cutting his eyes away from the backward verses on the metal stall door, Sam steered himself away from the possibly dangerous waters of the _"you can't choose your family"_ remark. He smiled boyishly before saying, "'Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left.'"

In spite of himself, and very reluctantly, Dean's face contorted to hold a strained smirk and then a half bemused smile. "'Yes I have.'"

Sam sternly motioned his head to his brother's arms – which were very much still there – as if to say, "_Look!_"

Bringing his head down to check on the status of his appendages, Dean shrugged his shoulders. "'It's just a flesh wound.'"

Laughing, Sam walked over to his brother and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. He quickly removed it in order to mimic the older man's stance. "Okay. We'll go, but only because you feel so strongly about what you saw. I still think it's nothing but stress–"

"I hope so, too," Dean interrupted below his breath.

"–but for you we can check it out. Straight after, though, vanquish or no, we're going to that railroad station. I tell you, if we don't come across anything in that house and find ourselves with another Corpus Christi disappearance, you'd better kiss your ass good-bye." Sam sighed. "Going on a wild goose chase with some law breakers to a house that may or may not have a killing room…."

Dean pushed himself off of the counter and started for the door, stopping a few feet from the exit. "I don't want to spend any more time talking about this, Sammy. It's making me feel icky." He shuddered dramatically – yet handsomely – to give evidence of this. "But I do want to get back out there before those damn Yankees get themselves slaughtered."

Sam smirked, a geeky kind of thing that had been with him since birth, and began to follow his brother out of the restroom. "Yeah, I don't like them much either."

When he reached the door, Dean placed his hand on the brushed metal pull, but didn't swing the door inward. Instead, he looked back to Sam. "It's not that I don't like them, Sammy, for you'd have to be _blind_ not to like that out there–" he grinned broadly "–I just don't appreciate how they come down here with those big city, college views and expect to be treated like some kind of royalty."

"Royalty," Sam repeated blandly, like the noun had a rancid taste to it.

"Yes," his brother replied, evidently at a loss to the remark that had done everything but stab the brunette square in the chest. "At least two of them have these fancy degrees from a starchy school and make it seem like the rest of us illiterate folk have to kiss their feet. Hell," he waved a hand proudly between he and Sam, "if it wasn't for us they'd be off getting themselves killed. I don't know about you, Sammy, but I don't think you can protect yourself much from a phantom with a piece of paper with barely dried ink on it."

"I don't know, it could give out some nasty paper cuts," Sam replied wistfully.

Dean pursed his lips. "Whatever. I'm just so glad you came along, because if I had to listen to one more minute of them and their self-righteous Creeper titles…." He pulled the door open and hissed, "Who ever heard of a Monique with _red_ hair, anyway?" before marching out of the unsymmetrical men's bathroom.

"Surely, Dean," Sam began with an amused smile, "you jest. What with all of your… _travels_, you've come across a French maiden without dark hair."

An arm flung backward to strike the nappy haired kid across the abdomen, not hard but not plushy soft either. "Shut up."

Putting a hand to his stomach in response to the dull pain blooming there, Sam walked with Dean around the rental movies, the Oklahoma souvenirs and back to the group of law ignoring Creepers. During the brothers' talk, the three Northerners had moved from the bakery area over to the long shelving system (beneath the high placed picture windows) by the pay counter – all clumped together around something between the cigarette lighters and plaster animal figurines. They turned around and pleasantly re-greeted the brothers Winchester when the latter arrived at the miscellaneous wall.

Steve was the first one to talk. This time Sam was able to tell exactly what kind of speech impediment the lazy mohawk had. Standing closer to him now, two feet to the left of Steve's dangling cross earring, the tall nerd was able to see the scar running vertically along the pinch of Mohawk's upper lip. He had been born with a cleft lip/palet and the doctors had done a wonderful job with their long series of surgeries to mend it. The Yankee's top front teeth looked uncannily real, not like the dentures some people wore that were too big for their facial structure or far too white, and he spoke so well that if Sam hadn't been detail oriented by nature, his mind (he knew) would have easily ignored it. In fact, if it wasn't for Steve's slight problem with some consonant sounds, Sam's brain would have lacked to register the mild encumbrance entirely.

"We'd thought you'd stepped intah a black hole," Steve explained with a soft smile, and the false teeth that looked too real, paired with the impossibly faint scar, added a scent of unrest to the atmosphere. Sam actually had to look away.

Monique met Sam's face with a tilted head and schoolgirl grin. "Yes?"

Chuck, thankfully, was no longer roping Red to him like a bovine. His eyebrows, relatively groomed with a scar-like obstruction slicing down the middle of the black arch above his left eye, rose in curiosity. A Woodstock PEZ dispenser was being held up in his right hand, the yellow bird sitting cheerfully on its perch, ready and willing to vomit up a tablet of candy when prompted.

Sam was staring at Snoopy's best friend with a kind of sick perversion. The rectangular dispenser was all but vanished in the Gothic mob boss's gigantic, body-builder's hand, and it could have so easily been Sam's neck. The kid blinked and looked back to Monique. "We'll go," he told her calmly.

From behind him and to his right, Dean might have nodded. "Took some doing, but I talked him into it."

"Hey, that's great, man," Steve exclaimed. "Tha more tha merrier, andah set of history writers is even better."

A hand clapped Sam hard on the back. "Got that right," Dean replied. "We'll be able to finish our novella just yet, Sammy!"

If it wouldn't have blown their cover, Sam wouldn't have hesitated to ask his brother how on earth he had known what the term novella meant. "Oh, joy."

Woodstock regurgitated a piece of candy into Chuck's waiting mouth, a rather disgusting demonstration of a mother bird feeding her young. "It'll make this trip even more worth while," he announced through the crunching of fruit flavored brick. "Sometimes it's not enough for us to visit these places and take pictures of them. Sometimes we need that extra set of hands there to _really_ document the place in the way only writers can, yaknow?"

Though she looked sour by her boyfriend's comment, Monique made an attempt to not show it in her voice. "With a place like this, it's just not fitting to have a bunch of kids like us running around the estate, not when the house has been through all it has. Imagine, two writers walking through a house that has seen war and battle." She smiled, though it was much like a crocodile. "You must be bound to notice things a historian like me can't – the emotions in the walls and what those walls have to say."

"Well," Sam started with one raised shoulder, "I guess we'll have to see, won't we?"

It must have been Gang Up On Samuel Winchester Day, for Steve jumped up (being so short, he needed a little extra help to reach this new man's shoulders, set close to some six feet up in the air) and shook Sam almost by the neck. "You don't seem so excited, but once we get on tha move – oh, man!" Luanne Plotter from _King of the Hill _was in there all right, but stuffed way back in the dusty corner of shadow, lost to speech therapy and a determination to not be eaten alive in grade school. "You won't regret this."

Monique brought a hand to the loose curls cascading down her shoulders, scrunched them up with a look in her brown eyes Sam couldn't pin a name tag to. "Not at all, Sammy, not at all. God, opportunities to witness pieces of history like this don't come up very often. Too many walk through their lives in a haze, but this – oh, this is the only shot of excitement there is, and it doesn't float around to just _anyone_."

Dean was glowering in one way or the other, Sam was sure of that. It was obvious through the raw connection only siblings shared that the older brother wanted to state coldly that, one, the brothers Winchester had come across a mighty amount of excitement without once going into any dilapidated house to gawk. That, two, she was going on with her self-righteous Creeper titles again (Red might have been attractive – standing on your head with dope reddened eyes – but her personality completely ruined it). And finally, at number three, nobody _but nobody_ called Sam Sammy if they hadn't been born a Winchester man.

Sam smiled politely at Monique, though he had the inkling that it was more of a sneer. "It's Sam."

With his mohawk being as tall as it was (or long in the current state it was in) when Steve shifted his head, strands of strawberry blonde hair fell away from the shaved bald sides of skull and to his face. "Well, then, Sam, get ready furrah real rush."

Woodstock must have turned his stomach dry, for Chuck shoved the bird into his back pants pocket. He motioned his glossy black locked head to the new troupe members, in effect a following order that the brothers promptly obeyed. The ghost busters walked with the Creepers out of the mini mart, through the door enclosed foyer housing a bulletin board and newspaper racks, and into the night fallen winter parking lot.

Chuck turned slightly, still walking in a north-westerly direction, and blew steam from his nostrils. "If you want to meet us in our hotel room tomorrow, we can go through everything and make sure you're prepared. Is four o'clock okay? That'll give us two hours before we need to head on out and be on the road, get to the house around six thirty or seven."

Dean stepped into Sam's field of vision. "Yeah, that's perfect."

Chuck frowned. "I'm sorry for the rush, yaknow, but you said you were in a hurry, and so are we. Mon and I have work, Steve's got school, and this might be the only space of time when the land's not crawling with people."

Sam shoved his hands in his jeans pockets in order to thaw them out. "Not a problem." And it most definitely wasn't, the extra hours meant more time to conduct a bit of research on the old Graham place.

Monique, naturally, walked rather speedily on her long legs. Folded in on herself to keep warm, she walked an interstate to a darkly painted van in the Dairy Queen section of parking spaces, not saying a word.

Steve, on the other hand, paced himself to hang around Sam and Dean. The look exchanged between the brothers was evidence to how they wished Steve hadn't, not with those eerily realistic set of upper teeth and a scar that should by every rule of nature be much more prominent than it was. Sure, he was a nice guy and a lively one at that, but those doctors of his had done too good a job on Steve as a young child… far too good a job.

"We're staying in room thirty-one at the Holiday Inn & Suites, third floor over-looking the lobby," Chuck expelled. "Just walk into the place like you own it and you'll be fine, but knock specially so we know it's you and not the cops or anything. Shave and a hair cut, yaknow it?"

Dean nodded. "Please, Sammy absolutely loved _Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?_ as a kid. He wore out the damned VHS tape twice."

"I wasn't that bad," Sam mumbled.

"I think you were," his brother countered.

Steve laughed and the sound was way too normal for a kid who at one point in time been dampered with a cleft lip/palet. It was not comforting at all. "As long as you know it."

Dean's cherished Chevrolet Impala was parked between a red Honda and a white Cadillac (one of those hideous newer models). The brothers stopped by its expertly built and maintained rear end and waved strangely to the two Creepers headed for their van – they had only met these people so many hours ago and now they were going to illegally enter a house together the next night? Were they suppose to wave, or hug, or what?

Chuck up-nodded at them, with Steve coming to an abrupt halt with a stricken look on his face. "Shit!" he yelled, peeling back the left side of his Redskins starter jacket and fumbling for something in one of the secret pockets.

Sam looked to Dean, who gazed back with a confused and _"Gee, I hope those letters on the gas price sign won't start moving around to tell me where my lost sock went to"_ expression on his face. They both looked back to Steve, who was walking toward them with a wrinkled piece of paper in his outstretched right hand.

"I almost forgot about this," he laughed at himself. "It'd be kinda tough to be at tha house tomorrow without any of tha proper stuff."

The folded sheet of paper was being waved more in Sam's direction, so he was the one to take it from mohawk boy. Nodding in thanks, he watched at Steve went to the black or midnight blue Creeper van before looking down at what he held. Opening it, Dean leaning in to read it more easily and snow beginning to drift down through the air, Sam closed his mouth before his lips dried out and cracked.

Aided by the lights over the gas pumps, it wasn't hard to read the computer typed message that could have done without the other half of page it didn't take up. The wind, acting up somewhere between entering the Dairy Queen in the late afternoon and exiting the mini mart not four minutes ago, tried to refold the paper but was met with failure. The paper bent forward, but because of Sam's thumbs couldn't retreat completely back into its prior state of deliverance.

"It's like these people think they're Indiana Jones," Dean remarked quietly and turned to get into his beloved Black Beauty.

Not wanting to become a human Popsicle, Sam followed suit and settled himself in the lush bucket seats of the Impala, slamming the creaky door behind him. Leaning back into the leather upholstery, Sam lifted the provisions list to the height of his shoulder, making it hit the light from the high-intensity lights behind the car.

Dean scoffed, shaking his head. He lifted his butt from the seat to take out his keys and then relaxed back down into it, clicked into his seatbelt – it wasn't the cool thing to do, but he wasn't set on flying through the windshield and becoming a mangled corpse just yet. "Hardhats, walkie-talkies, Carbon Monoxide detectors?" He actually giggled. "Those people are so out of their heads, they confuse themselves for voles."

Smiling at the insult even though he didn't want to, Sam folded the sheet of paper. After a struggle, one in which he smacked his knee against the dash – "Sammy, be careful, she can get a scratch!" – he managed to place the list in his right hip pocket. For a while he didn't say anything, simply sat in silent thought, as his brother started the classic '67 Chevy and tried desperately to back it out of the parking slot without taking off the side mirrors. This was done, with a very relieved sigh from the driver and a blank stare from the passenger. The scene played itself out much like this for a stretch of time that seemed longer than it actually was; Sam training to be a statue or one of the Queen's fur hatted guards, Dean singing along to an old rock tape he had plucked out of the box at random (Metallica, so maybe it wasn't random after all).

Finally, as Dean turned into the parking lot of the reasonably priced motel they were staying at, Sam inhaled sharply. This happened to him now and again, when he was so wrapped up in thought he hadn't been aware of his breathing, and it always seemed to startle his brother.

"You okay?" the blonde asked, not exactly showing his concern in tone, though it was most certainly there despite a monotonous delivery.

"Fine," Sam replied absently. He put a hand to his hip, over the pocket holding the list of necessary Creeper equipment, and frowned. "Do you honestly think they're doing this for the sole reason of the house being old?"

Dean slid his Beauty into a parking space right before their motel room, the headlights illuminating the brass number nine warmly. It shot back into obscurity when the engine was killed, the sensual purring of that grand monster dying off just as quickly. "Huh?" he asked, giving his car a loving pat on the steering wheel.

"The urban explorers, the Creepers, whichever name they prefer to go by," Sam reminded his brother. "Do you think there's something more to this than, for lack of a better word, exploring?"

The elder man was leaning forward with his hand wrapped around the door handle, had undone himself from the seatbelt that had protected his once awkwardly built body from great harm during the drive. He turned his head to acknowledge Sam. "Did Alice Cooper ever _really_ rip the head of that chicken and drink its blood?"

Sam was not and never had been a rock music guru. If Dean hadn't been his brother, Sam wouldn't have known who Alice Cooper was – let alone whether or not the whole chicken stunt at the Toronto Peace Festival was fact or fiction. College Boy's head was filled with useless trivia like the PH balance of lye and how to dismantle a small bomb, so something like this Alice Cooper question he could only blink at.

Dean smiled and shook his head. "One of these days, Sammy, I'm going to be your own school of rock. You see, someone from the audience tossed the chicken on stage and Cooper, being a kid from Detroit and thinking that chickens could fly, threw it back. The audience ripped it to bits, not him, so the answer would be no."

Sam hoped that by keeping the hopelessly lost expression on his face, Dean would explain himself in terms the Stanford boy could understand. Times like these he knew how Dean felt every moment of every day, and it made him feel pity for the man who had long ago been his hero.

"I think they're idiots, Sammy, too hung up on sneaking through abandoned buildings to do much else. I don't think they know about it, not when even _Dad_ was ignoarant to that Killing Room until you came home crying about it."

"I never cried," he denied indignantly.

"No, of course not. My mistake." Dean got out of the car and turned back around to face the automobile, smirked down into it at his brother. "You were bawling," he corrected himself before closing the door and gliding to the motel room on that signature walk of his.


	4. Four

**Chapter Four ; Virgin's Blood**

For the most part Samuel Winchester was a gentleman. Among other things, he always made a point to open doors for any woman he came into contact with, laid his jacket down in puddles so his girlfriend's shoes wouldn't find themselves on the wrong side of ruined, pulled out chairs, and never ever sat down at a table until the woman did. Yes, he was the regular misplaced southern white knight, punched in the stomach at every recess for being "such a pansy" – which in his high school years had escalated to "a fucking pussy" and rendezvous with the bottom of one of the learning institution's dumpsters. But through it all, he kept at it (ready and rarin' to go for his Gentleman of the Year acceptance speech) and made sure to always stomp crud off his shoes before entering a building. Really, there was absolutely nothing worse than walking around the room at night and stepping into a wet spot of what once was snow/sleet/something equally as unappealing. All right, maybe being bitten by a vampire was worse, but it was a yucky feeling to have wet coldness splotch onto a clean, dry sock or warm, bare foot, anyway. As Sam took that into thought, banging snow off the treads of his boots, he also wondered what had been slipped into his baby formula to make him that considerate – or flat out crazy.

His father, John, was an absolute slob, and Sam highly doubted the man had changed any amount since his elopement with vengeance. His innate ability to burn toast didn't say half as much about him as his cleaning habits; the "stuff everything under the couch" shuffle and the "if the stink don't wake the dead it's still wearable" jive. The dinnerware would pile up in the sink until there wasn't a plate in the cupboard to put a bagel on, and by then the gunk had encrusted itself onto the eatery with such a fervor the Winchesters basically had to throw everything out and start over again. Papers and notebooks had their home in leaning towers on the unused dining room table, eventually toppling over and spilling onto the floor – but they never could risk U-Hauling it out to the garbage dump, for who knew when they'd need an Arby's receipt from 1983?

Aunt Kate and Uncle Mike helped out around the house as much as they could, but the fact of the matter was the Winchester house was a pig sty. Actually, that was an insult to those clean animals. With a new analogy, the home looked more like it had suffered itself a tornado, ripping through all of the interior rooms but one. That one room, kept so clean that it might have twinkled if one paid close enough attention, had belonged to Sam. Like John, Dean had inherited the inability to work a vacuum cleaner, and maybe because of that (a striking fear of being swallowed up whole and alive in a pile of worn clothes, never to be seen again) caused little Sammy to move onto the front stoop of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Now in his early twenties, Sam had washed himself from most of the tics that had latched onto him in youth. Most meant all but two – a weird habit of pushing down the plastic domes on the refreshment cup tops in fast-food restaurants before being able to drink from them; and stomping each foot six times before entering a room from the outside (not one more than six, not one less). Those silly customs used to bother him into tizzies, mainly when Jessica would be halfway into the movie theatre with him still on the number five pound of his left foot, with the right still to go. But given the current state of his life, the goblin chasing and the fire demons and the Shinning slowly drenching him, Sam found that he was able to deal with those peculiarities a little more. That little more, however, wasn't enough to make him mention it to his brother or father.

The OCD of his childhood, mild though it was, had caused a rift or two between Sam and John. In the beginning it wasn't all that bad, the fissures, simply a hairline fracture in the dam wall, but over time they had certainly added up. From nearly getting himself a front row seat in death because he had to throw a knife a certain way (the slightly possessed bore had come within an inch of goring little Sammy before John stepped in), to tapping a specific tune on doorhandles before he could open them – one thing on top of another, on top of another.

No one had been blind to the condition, of course, but it wasn't something to be spoken about. Sammy had a problem, it was obvious as a missing nose, yet there were more important things to dwell on than whatever emotional or chemical issues had caused the sickness. Target practice clearly outweighed why a little boy walked down sidewalks in such a funny way, Latin language classes were so much higher up on the list than a kid who washed his hands until they were red and raw and aching. Sam had been fine with it, too, because he knew that college was the cure he had been searching for. Unfortunately for the Winchester family, that had been lacked to mention until the letter from Stanford University came. That day the hairline fractures between father and son had widened to the point of the dam wall crumbling away, and looking back on it that had been a good thing. Sam wasn't an idiot, he wouldn't ever admit that even if a madman took pliers to his teeth, but it was the truth. Leaving that house he had been halfway down the road to recovery. When Jessica had come into his life, finally convincing him to see someone about his fading yet still there OCD, the journey had been over.

Six on the left foot, six on the right, and the childhood Obsessive Compulsive Disorder had been caused by abandonment issues (along with a serious problem of constantly questioning self-worth). Sam still didn't understand how he could miss a mother he had never known, but he wasn't going to argue with talk therapy and a short course of medication.

With his hand on the doorknob to room number nine of the Super 8 motel, Sam couldn't help but ask himself if those few vials of pills had done much more than hush his queer, compulsive habits. It seemed a bit out there, but it wasn't too far gone for a hint of feasibility. Those doses of happy-looking pills not so long ago might have altered the firing pistons in his mind, had given him his premonitions and weak Telekinesis.

Sam laughed, turning the knob swiftly and pushing the door open. How nutty could he be to think something like that? He might have been starting to sound like some sort of science-fiction novel addict, but that didn't change the fact that he walked straight into a wall of heat that sucked his bones dry and turned his brain into a parched raisin. With his mind having shrunk to a hundredth of its original size, Sam fumbled the door closed and made his way further into the Sahara desert.

A mouth dried like clay in a kiln, Sam looked over the two full beds flowing from the wall on his right, at a solidly built man hulking over something under the only window in the room. The drapes were still open, sending street lamp light onto the man's back, obstructed by the iron bars attached to the window to prevent drifting snow from breaking the glass.

"It's too hot in here, Dean," Sam complained, surprised he could speak with such a dry mouth and sandy throat.

The blonde turned around just enough to acknowledge his company. With knees bent, back arched forward, hands clasped in the traditional warming pose, Dean looked like a homeless Calvin Klein model. "Are you kidding me?" he asked, straightening his spine and looking back to the crème colored radiator. "I'm freezing my balls off!"

Taking his jacket off, Sam hung it neatly on the triple hook screwed into the back of the door (Dean's would surely be thrown into a lackluster heap on the floor). He walked over the the desk, looking nervously at the pen residing on the note pad, and pulled up his shirt sleeves. "That's nice to know, thank you. But, really, it's too hot."

Dean cast a longing look at the heater and turned its settings down, muttering a gruff "Yeah, yeah".

Sam's laptop was resting passively on the desk, smack dab in the center and all hooked up for whatever job it might be asked to do. The wiry brunette lifted the machine's screen up, to remind him in the morning he needed to do some research, and then rubbed the back of his neck.

"I smell like onions," he stated blankly.

"Yeah," Dean chortled. He was at his bed now, shockingly enough the one beside the heater, stripping himself of his boots and socks. As usual for him, Dean threw these away from him and let them land where they chose to. "Doesn't that take you back? Walking home in the afternoon, smelling so much like the Burger Hut it made the rest of us nauseous. Boy, I was so happy Dad made you quit that job to focus on fairies."

Sam frowned, taking his belt off and rolling it into a tight oval, placing it on top of his duffel bag. The carry-all rested on an extra chair by the bathroom door, and below the seat he set his own boots, his used socks (rolled neatly into a ball) balancing between either foot hole. "Black fairies or a bi-weekly pay check? You know, I'd still pick the money."

"So would I, actually, but not at the price of smelling like an onion ring."

The duffel bag wasn't a fancy one, it didn't have a hundred storage compartments or a well-known brand's insignia on it, but it carried clothes and that was all that really mattered. Sam opened the one and only zipper compartment and took out a plain tee-shirt and a pair of shorts. "Which is why I'm taking a shower. I trust you to not challenge Hades in a heating contest while I'm gone."

"You take a shower every five minutes, Sammy. Why don't you ever want to become one with the earth, huh?"

He looked to this brother, already down to his boxer briefs and settling himself under the bed clothes, comforter pulled all the way up to his chin. The expression on Sam's face wasn't anything special, nothing a scolding mother would give her child, but it was still enough to made Dean roll his eyes. He turned onto his right side, to face the heater, and rolled into a ball.

"Yes, mother, I won't," he grumbled sincerely. "Just don't _you_ use up all the hot water. I hate it when you do that, you know, it's like you're trying to peel your skin off or something." After a pause, one in which Dean pulled the covers around him in such a way it kind of looked like he had a second skin (crème with green leaves, brushed pink flowers), he might have furrowed his brow. "You're not getting goofy on me again, are you?"

Sam shook his head and walked into the bathroom, spacious with cold floor tiles. "If I was, you'd be the first one to know."

With a chill resonating up his feet from the off-white floor tiles, Sam turned with his change of clothes in his left arm and closed the door. It seemed bigger than the jamb, for it rubbed up against the metal strike plate and created a small amount of resistance, but it closed well enough and clicked into place. Out of habit, rekindled since living with his brother again, Sam locked the door. He hadn't done that in years, hadn't ever felt a need to when he was with Jessica (why would he have ever locked her _out_?), but he had barred doors all the time when he lived "at home". When he was in Kansas unlocked doors made him feel anxious, but sliding a bolt into a lock gave him a sense of tranquility in chaos. And hopefully Dean wouldn't need to pee in the next seven minutes.

The nightclothes were set on the downed toilet seat, folded into a pleasant stack in the order Sam would need them – undies, then shirt. He left them to cool slightly on the toilet lid and walked to the other side of the room, the tub being directly across from the toilet and to the right of the sink, when looking at things from the door. It was white resin, hidden behind a green shower curtain (the same green as the leaves on the comforters), and had a small shelf to hold the travel sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner. These hair care products where a little more than half gone, after Dean came through in the morning they'd need to make a call to the front desk asking for some more. Sam hoped they could get a different kind, but he doubted it. He'd have to suffer through meadow flowers until they left the motel room for good.

Sam pushed the shower curtain back further, enough for him to lean over and turn the faucet on without heavy cloth scratching at his face. With one arm holding back the ugly rectangular green blob, he stuck his other under the strong flow of water and turned the kitchy "diamond" knob back and forth to the desired temperature. When he was happy, his hand neither burnt off nor iced over, Sam pulled the lift rod up to start the shower. He stood back, letting the green curtain fall back into place, and walked over to the sink.

As he got undressed, he folded his clothes and placed them on the counter. There were two reasons for this, the main explanation being time usage (he could now easily brush his teeth in less time than it would take walking halfway across the room to the toothbrush, if he had decided to lay his dirty clothes by the clean ones) and the second one being he didn't _want_ to lay his dirty clothes by the clean ones. If some residue of his fire demon visit had gotten onto his clothes, there was no way Sam would risk it getting onto what little he slept in. It was simple common sense, if nothing else.

When he gave a haphazard glance to those soiled clothes and got into the shower, Sam didn't at first notice that something had taken place. The wrong peg had been placed in this spot on the board and a bad connection had been made, a connection that should not have taken place in all of the rational world. Inside a Hitchcock film, perhaps, but most definitely not the rational world. Maybe that was why Sam was clueless for three happy and bright minutes, because nothing as screwy as what had happened _should have_. Sure, this was Samuel Winchester that had just stepped into an alternate reality, but even this he wouldn't have dreamt up in a Tulsa, Oklahoma Dairy Queen booth over a double cheeseburger and basket of french fries.

While Dean waded around in the shallow waters of chilly-tiredness-turning-into-sleep, Sam stood under a pleasingly warm torrent of water – or what he thought was water, anyway. It took him until the moment he opened his eyes, after hair washing and face cleansing and everything else scrubbing, to realize that there was an operator half asleep at the switchboard.

Even after he opened his eyes, turning around to face the shower head and have it drum heat onto his chest, Sam didn't exactly know what was going on. His face set in confusion, slowly and dumbly at first but then it picked up intensity, and for a good minute (a _very long_ minute, indeed) he stood there staring. During that minute he didn't know what he was actually goggling at, it was simply too weird and out there to believe. But as the egg timer clocked down, the wheels in Sam's head began to turn. Much like his dumbfounded expression, it didn't run efficiently at first, but had to work its way up to that. As the wheels and sprockets did so, moving like a train going up and cresting over a tall hill, Sam's stomach knotted and twisted up into his throat. His heart started to beat wildly in its bone cage, eyes widening, hands trembling, body eventually running ten steps ahead of his brain.

The scream that clawed its way out of Sam's throat was at first choked, but after its initial catch it tried again and at full force. What came out that second time didn't seem at all to have come from Sam, not to himself at least. It was shrill, almost like a woman's, and bounced off the shower walls with all the agility of an Olympic pole vaulter. With pianists' hands, it reached under the door and beckoned anyone within earshot of the bathroom to come and see – which was Dean, who within nanoseconds of his brother's scream was there.

Sam was too busy screaming and pressing himself against the shower wall to hear his brother rattle the door handle, pound on the wood with his free fist to "open the door. SAMMY? Open the door!" But with the current state of the world, that might have been a good thing. To poor Sam, standing under a waterfall of blood – no doubt a gift from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse – the door might have been undulating like jell-o in a high wind.

It might have been funny, seeing the bathroom door mushroom inward like a kid's finger to puddy, but also could have been like something from a Wes Craven movie. Freddie Kruger, to be more precise, trying to manipulate himself into the bathroom, chanting his song for all to hear. With his hands he'd slice through the puddy-built bathroom door, poke his scarred face in and smile wide, singing: "One, two, Freddie's coming for you. Three, four, lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again…." And wouldn't that be fitting? Just the thing to pair with all the virgin's blood in the world cascading down onto Sam, to stain his skin forever and mark him as a–

Dean had always had an affinity for kicking down doors, possibly the reason as to why the shower curtain was yanked back so soon after Sam's screaming.

Drugged, that's what could only describe Sam's vision as he saw Dean look from the tsunami of blood to his brother and back again (from the edge of his eyes, of course, being glued to the image of a red waterfall). But – hold on a minute – there _was_ no red waterfall, not anymore. It had suddenly stopped, blinked out as if it had never been there in the first place.

A switch was flipped in Sam's mind, one marked "sensory overload", and the cause for that was witnessing the blood turn back into water. Normal, steamy water without a drop of human blood anywhere in its clear droplets. But around the water was something not very normal, a black tube-like structure, rapidly growing in thickness to the point where Sam went blind. This panicked him even more, going blind, and so did the heaviness in his head. All the sounds around him began to fade away as well, from the droning of water to the concerned yelling of his brother, replaced by a loud static-y pressure in his ears. Sam felt himself lean forward, dream-like and almost graceful, as if he was a tree falling down to the forest floor.

Something grappled at him too, rough hands that slipped along his wet flesh. They tried ruefully to hold onto him, Sam, but they weren't wanted. They tried his arms, then his chest and finally scratched at his back. Fingernails marks would soon show up along his shoulders, stinging and red and puffy, but for the moment all Sam could feel was the black heaviness in him, like an anvil atop an egg. He pitched forward and registered only a dull pain in his knees when they slammed onto the tub floor, couldn't really tell at all that he had slipped forward on soap residue and smacked his forehead against the faucet.

Before his panic attack took him completely away, dragged him into its cave of f-a-i-n-t and had its way with him, Sam saw (more than knew of) a name floating before his blind eyes.

"D'avianna Longhbrough," he recited, voice somewhere high up in Stratosphere, and then he was down for the count.


	5. Five

**Chapter Five ; Pugnacious**

It was much like looking out of a window during a flooding storm, the water a pulsating and gyrating sheet against the glass. One is able to distinguish random splotches from purposeful shapes, diluted colors from tricks of the eye — a could-be-a-Porche there, a little might-be-a-murderous-criminal there — but nothing is certain. Sam _might_ have woken up momentarily to find himself on the bathroom floor, Dean leaning over him and waving something putrid beneath the drenched brunette's nose, but the surety of that scene was nowhere to be found. It was also a possibility that he was conscious enough (though just barely) to clasp in mind that something or someone was carrying him — now dropping him on the hard floor, with a loud and nasty curse word to accompany the flub — but the dream-like quality of it all was too strong to argue with. One thing, however, need not be questioned: the complex, jack-in-the-box series of dreams that procreated with Sam's fragile psyche. But at least they were moderately lucid. Count your blessings, as they always say.

When he had smacked his head against the tub faucet, Woodstock and his twins circled around in the blackness before Sam's eyes. They up-chucked colorful candies in a rhythmic pattern, almost like a dance. Pink, purple, yellow, orange, turn. Pink, purple, yellow, orange, turn. It could have been something straight out of a Looney Tunes skit, one rejected because of copyright infringement among other things, like the sheer craziness of a bunch of little dancing birds. They must have been offended by that, of not being able to hang out with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote, for one by one they popped out of Sam's blindness like soap bubbles in the sun. After that, he spun around on a wheel for a while. Swirls of black and white with a dab of Winchester in the middle, going round and round and round and — it was sickening. Thankfully enough, the binds holding him down to the hypno-disk weren't made of anything too solid, more like vanilla frosting. They pulled apart under Sam's constantly shifting weight, a knife through butter, and he slid down the disk as if it had been made of greased plexiglass.

Falling heel over head, Sam traveled down through a colorless void that had no boundaries. It was the size of time itself, daunting in the way only endlessness can be, and filled the faint stricken boy with dread. Nothing flew by him to fill his well with hopelessness but deep black, and that was more than enough. To him it felt as though he was about to die a thousand deaths, or at least become lost somewhere within the farthest reaches of despair. The pile of dirty laundry in Dean's old bedroom couldn't hold a candle to this chasm, this throat of a monster Sam was falling down. Its stomach, he soon found out, resembled a staircase.

A man weighing on the lesser side of two hundred pounds falls from the sky, lands on a short flight of steps, and makes not a sound.

Gracefully as a cat, Sam landed, and looked up with first-person eyes at the squat door standing at the head of the staircase. The door leaned forward in a way of expectancy, as if telling Sam that the meeting had long ago been preordained, bound to happen. Why wouldn't it have been? If the premonitions had told him anything, all of life was preordained, the trick to it being one simple ponderance: Do you really want to have this piece play out a certain way, and would you stop at nothing to see that it happens in the manner you wish? The door seemed to straighten in response to that prose, became stiff as if it had been slapped in the face — if doors had faces.

Now, Sam was absolutely sure that it was him at the base of that snubby door ruled staircase, but then again this was not a traditional dream. Most people, he would assume, would watch themselves as an outsider in their sleep stories, not be trapped in a pair of eyes as he currently was. But, of course, who else could it have been moving around in confusion (this was the waking world, the narrative said)? Not Dean, or Roger the Rabbit, or a Woodstock PEZ dispenser, that much was certain. Feeling his chest expand and contract with a deep sigh, a kind of _"Well, here we go"_ gesture, Sam took a short gander at his surroundings.

There was nothing wondrous to behold, only a cracking plaster wall to his left, retreating steps behind him, and a vast, darkly lit room off to his right. Something about that area, with a line of windows resembling a broken smile, set Sam on edge. It was the lighting that must have worried him, the temperamental flicker of starlight that poorly sorted wall from floor. And innocently simple though it was, Sam knew deep within his gut that he didn't want to go in there. Nothing bad had ever happened in that storage room, he could feel that, but like a kid around an old, dark basement… there was simply no way in hell.

From the eerie cavern before him, Sam turned his body back toward the stunted stairway that had been in front of him when he had landed in this mysterious place. The word up resonated through his skull cavern, reassuring him that he needn't go into the storage area or down the spiral staircase behind him. Up. Up and forward. Nodding at this, Sam started for the stairs, felt the elderly treads shift under his weight as he began to ascend them. He counted to ten before he was at the insulted door.

It was shorter than it had first appeared to be, coming only up to his chin, with an old-world styled doorknob at shoulder level. There was a slight humor to it, a lightheartedness that took away the apprehension the storage area doused him with. The door gave off no ill vibes, no ghoulish air like what had waltzed around in the darkness behind the cracked mouth in the storage space, and that made him all the more eager to open the door and see what was on the other side. He felt like a child at his birthday, leaning over a large and brightly wrapped present, itching to rip off the paper and learn what exciting and deafeningly loud toy he had gotten. Like those times, the muscles around his mouth were taught in a smile, aching as Sam placed his left hand on the doorknob.

It pulsed like a heart beneath his loose grip, was warm as liquid life.

Sam cocked his head, curious, and looked down at his hand. He felt no urge to pull it away, none whatsoever, and that made him wonder. Closely he stared at it, thought to move it and watched as fingers waved around the knob, felt skin rub against metal. It was _his_ hand, no need to worry, and encased nothing more than an old brass ball with an emblem tattoo — nothing too fancy, just what looked to be a design of ivy. It neither glowed nor showed and other sign of abnormality, but the thing _beat_. The pulse spread from Sam's palm and up his arm, yet it did not send any light through his veins or burn his skin. It was a life force, neither passive nor agressive but simply being.

The heartbeat was strong and calm, determined like an honor student at final exams. It flashed not a single image across Sam's mind, cared not to explain itself or make friend, foe. The doorknob just stayed fixed there, beating and sending pulsating warmth to Sam's hand, seemingly ignorant of anything other than itself. That made Sam think of his brother, of what people must think of him upon introductions, of how callous and stupid they surely must describe the handsome blonde to friends. While Sam's pulse fluttered with a relative to pity and anger at the thought of someone badmouthing his older brother, the doorknob didn't once stray from its sheet music. It remained horribly on track, void of any thought but the one containing its duty of beat. Frowning, Sam narrowed his eyes at the hand wrapped around the brass knob, vision giving no clue as to what the metal ball really thought itself. He was getting angry at it, at how it simply sat and beat and did nothing else. An explanation was wanted, but an explanation the damned doorknob would not give.

Sam opened his mouth, feeling that his face was no longer bright with childlike curiosity but twisted in rage. He was going to yell at the thing in his hand, was going to scream at it with a frothing mouth and demand answers. What could have possibly been in the door wood to give it life? That was what he wanted to know, and he was about to voice his confusion when a torch lit on the other side of the beating knob.

As if someone had crouched down on the other side of the door, stuck a flashlight up to it and turned the device on, moonlight passed through the key hole. In an instant, light was kissing the flesh of his left hip and elastic logo of his Tommy Hilfiger briefs. Words like white butterflies landed on the protrusion of pelvic bone as well, flexing silk smooth wings and prancing about on fur laden toes. Sweet nothings, that was what the words were, too soft to hear but undeniably there, much like human greed. It was simultaneously beautiful and frightening, yet Sam remained on the door landing as if he was glued there.

In the key-shaped beam of white light, unnamed things danced, sending soft shadows to float lazily in the ethereal incandescence. Like a woman's voice — Christina Scabbia's, maybe, singing the chorus of "Swamped" — it captured Sam and refused to let go. It locked onto his heart, squeezed until he felt as though it would burst, and tears welled in his eyes. Though it was impossible for Sam to hear the words passing through the key hole on great luminance, he could feel them well enough, and they were slowly killing him.

The sadness in the light was so profound, so chilling, Sam felt his chest shudder before he was even aware of his weeping. The verses could have ranged anywhere from _"I'm stuck here alone. Falling away from you, no chance to get back home"_ to a depressing rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel". It didn't very much matter, the crushing emotion in those words he couldn't hear would have sent him to his knees either way.

And the doorknob would have kept on its steady beating as though nothing had ever happened.

Blinking tears out of his eyes, he forced himself to look absolutely anywhere as long as it wasn't the light hitting his skin. Able to see — for the time being, at least — Sam turned the beating knob to the left, pushed the door inward while stepping forward. Moonlight enveloped him, rendering him temporarily blind by the brightness. When it faded down to a crisp sheen against his bare skin, Sam found himself in a cheery nursery. _Cheery_, with air light and smelling of Eau de Baby Powder, definitely not the place where that sad, sad song had come from. But he had been so sure….

The room was familiar to him while also being foreign, in a way like a song a U.S soldier might have heared while sitting in a WWII-era Russian coffee shop.

It wasn't the blue paint on the walls that gave Sam a strong sense of deja vu, nor the happy animal mobile above the honey colored crib, nor the lively quilt neatly laid out in that baby bed. The emotion leaking from the walls like a million beads of sweat through pores, that was what Sam knew so well. It was visibly mixing together with the light from the moon, filtering in through the window overlooking a well-and-lovingly used rocking chair. Amour (but not the same type to waft through key holes and make Sam cry) wound through the air like velvet smoke in a still room, cloaking the teddy bear sitting in the seat of the chair, which began to slowly rock back and forth. It sat empty for a few tense moments, silently leaning to and fro for moonlight to bounce off of little Teddy's black eyes, before a woman gradually materialized in it. She sat in the worn rocker, blonde hair falling down around her shoulders, a young child in her arms.

Though the babe coming into focus was breast feeding, face turned away from its invisible visitor, Sam knew fully well that the brown haired baby was himself. Seeing the newborn him being cradled by his mother made him very self-conscious, uncomfortably aware that he was standing before this scene half naked. Embarrassed, he crossed his wrists over his bathing suit area, spreading his legs in the stance of a Marine at ease. He felt his face burn scarlet, but was relieved when his mother didn't look up to scold him for his inappropriate attire. Instead, she remained deathly concentrated on her task of rocking baby Samuel as he fed, smiling down at her second born son and softly singing. It was the classic nursery song about the mocking bird, diamond ring, valentine that Momma would all buy — not the rhythm that had come to him while he stood on the other side of the door, however. Now, hearing this, Sam understood why he used to hum that song to Jessica (the nursery rhyme), holding her close on cold nights and stroking her hair.

Despite being in a humiliating state of dress, Sam smiled longingly. How could he have ever hated a woman who had willingly gotten up in the middle of the night to feed him when he called, who had held him and rocked him and soothed him with song?

But, of course, this Mary Winchester was a dream one, for the flesh and blood woman had died long ago. Her spirit had recently been spotted roaming around the old Kansas home — until she destroyed herself to save her sons, a horribly cliché thing to do but it was greatly appreciated. Still, as long as Sam had reason to not hold a grudge against a woman who had gone and gotten herself killed… for him. Christ. This woman had loved him enough to die for him, how many children can say that about their parents? About _anyone_?

This dream mother lifted her head when Sam sighed loudly, loathing himself for hating her so long ago — hating her so much he had given himself a brief visitation with a mental disorder. Mary looked at him, her smile gone but a glow remaining on her face (from a mother's love, not the moonlight). She rose from the rocking chair carefully, so as not to upset baby Sammy, and walked over toward the grown.

The little one stirred, cooed, and went back to suckling.

Mary moved her legs and feet, but she might as well not have. The woman floated across the navy blue carpeting of the nursery, the one that had burned away twenty-two years ago, without looking away from Sam. She was holding the younger version of him firmly, like if she didn't all the world would melt away. His left hand, so little it was almost lost against the mother's skin, was resting against her left breast, feeling the strong and comforting march of her heart.

Sam looked down at his own left hand, lifting it up hesitantly and staring at it as a reluctant killer might study the bloody weapon he was holding. The pulse was still there, warming his palm and lethargically traveling up his arm. Raising his eyes but not his head, Sam watched his mother come to a stop before him. His mouth was open, a pained expression on his face. If he had known it was his mother's heart he had felt against the doorknob, he wouldn't have gotten so angry.

Mary didn't react to her son's facial plea, merely lifted her arms in the slightest way necessary. She looked down at baby Sammy, done eating and staring back up at her with wide, aquamarine eyes. He gave a toothless grin and raised his hands to her, clasping them, as if saying, _"Hey, I know you!"_

Picking up his head, Sam held out his arms, tenser than a compressed coil.

Without a single word, mother handed son the child. Her face placid and eyes bottomless, Mary stood and watched Sam, closed her nightgown top while her son the man gaped in wonderment at what she had given him.

Sam cradled the baby in his naked arms, looked from his mother to the small life he was holding so nervously — like at any moment he would cause the child to shatter, a glass figurine thrown to the ground. But staring down at the newborn version of himself, fuzzy awe quickly gave way to jagged disgust. No, more than that, repugnance. He wanted to cry out and drop the baby to the ground, but found that he couldn't, for he was simply too repulsed.

The babe was mutilated, so much so it that was almost beyond words.

Horrified, in desperate need of guidance and _some kind_ of back-up to the fading conviction that he wasn't losing his mind, Sam could only make mewling noises in his throat as he found himself stitched to the mangled child. As much as he wanted to, needed to, he just couldn't let go of the babe — couldn't even look away from it. It had roped him in with those inquiring aquamarine eyes, the only thing remotely normal about the tiny human. Too shocked to so much as gag, Sam managed to stare helplessly down at a baby who had been severed almost in half. It was dressed with so many cuts on its small body, Sam wasn't able to tell where skin ended and internal organs began. Simply put, the baby's insides were spilling out over Sam's arms.

Yelping, trying to scream for his mother to do _something_, Sam looked up to her and instantly regretted doing so. Mary Winchester wasn't there anymore, neither was the cheerful nursery.

Sam, twisting around in search of bearings, found himself in a small room. He recognized the short, fat door off against one wall, but not the hardwood floors or the walls or the small bed in the corner of the room — the only piece of furniture save a wee table, holding a lit oil lamp and opened book.

He felt faint again, but wished he wouldn't do so while here in a strange place he had never been before. A strange place he had never been before with a skinned woman standing before him, screaming so loudly it was animalistic, and tearing at her hair. As Sam's eyes rolled back into his head from too much shock, as his arms tried maniacally to drop the howling baby in his arms, he noticed something more disturbing than anything else so far. Between the woman's teeth, bared savagely, were bits of chocolate colored flesh. In both of her hands, brought up and tugging at her thick black hair, were more pieces of her own skin, _chunks_ caught between her fingers.

The world washed away then, turned again into the runny sheet of water on the window glass. It was heaven sent, the interlude, but when Sam opened his eyes to the motel room ceiling, he was convinced that he was still dreaming. He was positive of the fact that the woman with no flesh was going to lean over his bed, continue screaming at him, and that was why he came up out of sleep swinging.

His eyes were squeezed shut, fists cutting through the air with no sense of purpose until something tried to pin him down. Those hands, the force behind them, sent Sam's mind into overdrive. He thrashed his head back and forth, seeing the woman who was without a doubt D'avianna Longhbrough trying to rip his own skin off, and punched. He punched and he kicked and he screamed.

What in God's name was happening to him?


	6. Six

You know how when you're reading a book, or watching a movie, or playing a video game and you're so anxious to move onto the more exciting part (_it's right there! can't I just skip this damned part already?_), but you just seem perpetually stuck in mud? Yeah, that's how I feel with this chapter. I just want to move onto the next part, the part were nothing is sacred anymore.

**Chapter Six ; Clipped Wings**

When Sam put his mind to it, he had all the genteelness of Vlad the Impaler. It was actually sort of refreshing, going from puny book worm to squealing rat in less than six seconds. But, unfortunately for Sam, that bit of fresh air was forced out of him before he could enjoy it.

"God dammit, Sammy, it's your brother!" he heard Dean yell, right before two hands shoved his rigid body back onto the mattress. The power of those hands, the collision back down onto the bed, was akin to a semi-truck ramming into a serving a flan. Sam never did very much like that dessert and feeling like it made him even less amused.

All the air in the brunette's lungs came out of him in a comical _whoosh!_ing noise. His eyes popped open, giving him a rather displeasing – yet fascinating – view of his brother's face. Dean was so close to the panic attacked brother, in fact, that Sam could easily count every last one of the older man's pores. What he saw? Not a single damned black head. That lousy Dean, getting all of the good cards in the gene pool of looks. That lousy _model envied_ Dean. That lousy, stinking –

"Brother?" Dean asked slowly, too slowly, as if speaking to a very old and extremely hearing impaired individual. The word had come out as "brah-thurr".

Sam willed himself to go as limp as possible, only for the sake of his pain riddled back, but made sure his head was able to do as pleased. He looked swiftly around the room like a jack rabbit stalked by a wolf, eyes blazing with paranoia and mouth incapable of forming a single word in any known language. He also tried to sit up, give himself a better look into the shadowy bathroom, but Dean's hands were still pushing down on his skinny shoulders. Really pushing down, so much so that Sam could feel bones shifting.

The younger of the Winchester duo grunted, sneered, trying to carry out the message his voice box wasn't yet willing to comply with:_ "Lay off, man. Can't breathe."_

Dean bit down on his lip, looking hard at the man whose ribcage he was no doubt going to break if he kept on trying to hold him down. Reluctantly, visibly weighing the options of letting his brother go or having one of the kid's ribs puncture a lung, Dean took his hands away. Moving like a rusty wind-up toy that hadn't been used in a hundred years, he leaned back into a sitting position on the bed, hands on his thighs. He might have backed off, but one thing was for sure: no time soon would he stop staring at his kid brother, eyes wide in earnest and disturbed concern – one would think that Sam's head was about to pop off, like a tick with a too full belly. Of course, being Dean, he wouldn't ever _admit_ to being worried. Not a soul would ever find him saying things a normal person might say to someone who had just had a panic attack. Nope, that wasn't Dean Winchester, and Sam was painfully used to it by now.

Over the years Sam had learned what to expect from his brother, knew well enough to not bother pointing out how Dean's eyes might have said _"you had me worried sick"_ while his mouth spat out something like –

"You sucker punched me, you little bitch!" he hissed, rubbing the the left side of his stubble covered jaw.

Sam's mind was still spinning like a top, anxiously waiting for a slow down and a place to rest. For the moment, however, he was stuck on the spinning tea cups run by a mad carnie conductor. His throat was even getting thick with nausea, eyes rolling back into his head and stomach twisting.

"Sammy?" Dean's voice seemed to come to him from a mile away, faint as if carried by the breeze. "In the bucket, Sammy. In the bucket."

D'avianna was coming to him again, her picture on a piece of string that was dropped down in front of Sam's face. She was keening like a banshee, hands up to her face, but most importantly _skinned alive_ with bits of her flesh between her teeth and fingers. In a much delayed response to the horror of that image, of seeing a person who had methodically eaten her own skin, Sam's stomach pinched shut and he scrambled to sit up.

"In the bucket, Sammy!" his brother shouted, scrambling for something on the right side of the bed. "Not on me, kiddo, don't you dare!"

The disemboweled baby was in his arms, entrails spilling over him and onto the ground, his mother with no skin standing in front of him and howling.

With a final and shrilly put "Not on me, Sammy. In the bucket!", the boy's stomach lurched and he heaved with such force it seemed his throat would rupture. But at least he didn't vomit on his brother, the blonde had shoved the trash can beneath his head just in the nick of time – Sam even smacked his already tender forehead against the green plastic brim.

Over his puking, Sam heard Dean wince and apologize. "Sorry, Sammy," he said sympathetically, gently patting the brunette's bony right shoulder. The gesture was a hesitant one, however, a kind of halting, preoccupied-with-getting-vomit-all-over-him movement. Eventually, it stopped and the bed shifted with displacing weight.

If he could have helped it, Sam would have made sure not to puke on Mr. Studly, but he hadn't any idea of how much control he had over _anything_ anymore, set aside retching.

All his life Sam had been one of those people who loathed to vomit, one of those freaks who threw up again solely because they up-chucked the first time, then a third because they threw up that second time. Usually it never lasted more than three verses of Bulimic at the Toilet, but this time Sam sang the whole gotdang song. It was involuntary, a primal urge to expel all the evil that he had come across that day. From fire demons to skinned woman, he wanted it all out of his body and out as soon as humanly possible. But it was a joke to think that that would ever happen, that Sam would ever be rid of the images burning themselves into his brain, and so he stopped vomiting several yards short of total purge.

He hunched over the trash can turned vomit bucket for a while, keeping his head in there just in case he received a standing ovation and wants of another recitation of Bulimic at the Toilet. The smell wasn't a very pleasant one, but with his head down the dizziness and confusion attacking his brain slowly surrendered the battle. When their backs had turned into tiny specks disappearing over the crest of a distant hill, Sam gingerly took his head from the bucket his brother had shoved under his face. He was feeling rather okay until a sharp pain made itself known, slicing across his head. Sam groaned loudly and brought a hand to his forehead. It was pounding, absolutely _pounding_.

Through his pain narrowed eyes, still rubbing at his wounded face, Sam saw his brother standing over by the desk and possessed motel pen. Dean turned around slightly, just enough to find out what was causing College Boy's distress. "Oh, yeah. That." He shrugged lightly. "When I was trimming your beard, Rip van Winkle, I took the liberty of patching up that gash. It's going to be a beaut, that one. Hew-wee, you should have seen yourself collide with that faucet. _My_ head hurts just thinking about it."

Dean laughed softly and came back over to the bed, there no longer being a threat of getting vomited on and if there was – two or three giant steps and he'd be back out of the firing range. He took the trash can vomit bucket and, with raised eyebrows (_"Now pay attention and see where it's going to be, because I really will kill you if you puke on me"_), motioned with it before setting it in its previous spot on the carpet.

Sam fingered his brother's bandage work as carefully as he could. "How long was I out?" he asked, prepared to hear something between two minutes and five hundred years.

Dean sat down on the bed, nearly crushing his brother's toes. "Couple of hours," he expounded. "It was touch and go there for a while, like, you were on a bobbing ship."

"Please don't mention things like that," Sam replied meekly, resting his head in his hands.

The blonde frowned. "Right. Sorry. But that's what it was like for a while; it'd look like you were waking up and then you'd fall back deeper into sleep." It was obvious to Sam how restless his brother was, for he kept twittering his fingers and finally stood up, walked over to the desk again and rearranged the ink blotter. "You were muttering, too," Dean added.

Worried that his brother knew about those crazy dreams Sam had had, he gingerly hoisted himself up into a reclining sitting position, rested his back against the bed's headboard. He tried not to let a wince show itself on his face, bit the inside of his cheek instead. "You dropped me on my ass, didn't you?" he accused, glad for something with which to move the discussion away from mutterings.

With Dean's back turned, Sam wasn't able to see the guilty frown that might have passed over his brother's face. It might not have been there at all because when the blonde turned around, the laptop in his hands, that all too familiar cocky smile was plastered onto him. "Yeah," he admitted coyly, "but I couldn't really help it, man. You're nothing but bone, kept jabbing me in the stomach."

"Good," Sam replied smartly. "I'm glad, gets you back for subjecting me to all that _music_ during the car rides."

Dean scowled. "Hey, it's a hellova lot better than the crap you used to listen to. N'Sync. Of all the music in the world, _N'sync_? God, Sammy, it was such an embarrassment."

Limply crossing his arms across his abdomen, Sam smiled as slyly as he could for being in the state he was in. "As I recall, you used to enjoy a couple of their hits. In fact, I remember how you used to _dance to those hits_ in front of the bathroom mirror – singing along, pretending you were Justin Timber–"

"Keep going and that episode will be the least of your worries," Dean threatened with a pointing hand.

Sam's crooked grin faded faster than sidewalk chalk in a downpour. "It was not an episode," he denied curtly.

Dean guffawed rather loudly. "What were you screaming about then, Sammy boy? There was absolutely nothing I could see, not a thing. I highly doubt you've got a phobia of bathroom tile, so if it _wasn't_ an episode…."

"I don't like your tone," Sam replied harshly. "I didn't speak that way when you told me about your word game with the Dairy Queen menu board."

Dean turned around, picked up Sam's laptop and carried it over to the bed. "What tone, _Mother_?"

With heavy legs, Sam pulled his feet away from his brother's crushing backside. "You think I've gone off the deep end, but I haven't. It was a vision I had, Dean, one of the worst ones I've ever had. You've had a creepy one as well, so don't you dare act like I'm the only nutcase in this motel room."

"I resent that," Dean snipped, forcibly placing the portable computer into Sam's lap.

"Whatever, Dean. I'm not in the proper frame of mind to deal with you," Sam replied. He rearranged the computer enough to be able to properly see what was on the screen.

Dean pulled his lips back from his teeth in a snarl – it did nothing for his looks. "What the hell is _that_ suppose to mean?"

"You're making my headache worse," the young brunette observed tartly. "What is it that you want me to look at?" He tried to focus on the multitudinous windows Dean had opened and bookmarked while Sam raced through the land of dream, but found that his eyes wanted to make everything a massive blur. Sam set the laptop aside and looked to his brother, who was shaking his head in ego fractured annoyance.

"Blog entries, that's mostly all I found, and they're only a mention," he started dryly. "They don't have anything to do with hauntings, either, just how Eric got so drunk in the living room there he knocked out his own tooth, how Jesse scored with Carmen _and_ Ellie. Kids these days, I tell ya…," Dean sighed as if jealous, but sharply waved a hand at the computer to signify his moving onto a new topic. "And the other thing is a brief newspaper article. The Graham Mansion's going to used as a practice for the local Volunteer Fire Department, then a strip mall's going up in its place. There's a petition going around to save the place, to rehab it and turn it into a museum, but the article says it won't be of any use – yeah, who'd want to go to a museum when they can go to a Pier I instead? First Tuesday of next month that house is lighting up like a candle. Poof."

Sam shifted uncomfortably, rolled his eyes down to his stomach.

"Hey, I'm sorry, Sammy," Dean apologized sadly. "I didn't mean…."

"It's fine," he sharply cut off his brother's trailing thought.

Sighing again Dean picked the computer back up, meaning to return it to the desk. That was a giant red flag, for he only did tidy things like that when he was nervous or worried. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it is just a house, the Killing Room only a product of a game of Telephone."

Sam silently watched his brother set the computer back onto the table, pick up the demon Super 8 pen and twirl it about his squat fingers. They stood on either side of the room in thick silence for what seemed like twenty minutes (it had to have been at least ten because the laptop's screensaver kicked in), Dean twirling the haunted pen around with his fingers and Sam lightly staring at the possessed utensil. Actually, it must not have been as lightly as Sam at first thought – his eyes began to grow tense with strain right around the time the black and red pen flew out of Dean's grasp, as if pulled by invisible hands. He shifted in bed nervously, flutter blinking his eyes as Dean mumbled a swear word and bent down to retrieve his toy.

"Butterfingers," he grumbled after his make-a-sailor-blush profanity. Blind to the fact that his brother had been the one to _rip_ the pen out of his rough hands _with his mind_, Dean went back to twiddling.

Sam, as if he couldn't control himself, seemed to urge himself to look back at that pen. In less than half the time it took to drop the utensil for the first attempt, Sam was able to make it meet the sandy carpet a second time. And unlike its last flat and boring decent to carpet, this time the Super 8 pen spun end over end before it stabbed the expensive carpeting with its capped ballpoint face.

Dean snorted and squatted down onto his haunches again, snatched up the pen like an angry coke addict might grab up his little baggy of snow white release. Still unaware that his klutzy tendencies had nothing to do with the pen dropping to the ground, he went back to playing with it – having to pick it up over and over again was a hundred times better than dealing with Sammy when he was in a mood.

But "Sammy" had forgotten all about his mood now, was too grossly enthralled with his pen manipulating abilities to even recall what he had said exactly to upset Dean so. He was staring at the ballpoint again, the black plastic tube with the red cap and lettering; staring at it so intensely that when he moved it from his brother's hand, he didn't just pull – he yanked. The thing soared across the room and hit the wall, right in the center of a framed painting of a meadow.

"The hell?" Dean exclaimed, his brow furrowed in fright and confusion. He looked down at his right hand, scanning it carefully as if it were a bomb, then slowly turned his head to acknowledge his brother – sitting there innocently on the bed, rubbing the bandage in the middle of his adorable little forehead. "Did you just see that?"

"See what?" the brunette asked dumbly, lifting his head from his left hand.

Dean looked back at his hand, then the impressionist painting of the meadow. His mouth was unhinged, letting all the flies in.

Sam had the slight inkling that Dean knew who had played with the pen, had a hunch that the first words out of Dean's now moving jaw would be accusations in _that tone_. And so he changed the subject, now that he had his brother's attention again. "You think it's a mistake to go there?" Sam asked, standing on the borderline between relief and fright. Relief: he was starting to get better control of his eerie ability, which meant it wasn't so scary anymore. Fright: it was still pretty damn scary if you asked him. Everyone knew what happened to Carrietta White after all.

Dean shrugged, tapping the haunted pen's notepad against the desk since he no longer had the pen itself to fiddle with. "Not a mistake, per se, but I don't think we should go there just now. You freaked out in the shower for no reason I could see, then you were moaning and groaning in your dreams worse than anytime before. Not to mention that Killing Room is probably what you first said it was, a myth that got way out of hand."

"But that's just it, Dean. Maybe after what's happened to me, what I saw, we should go there. Telephone-itis or not, maybe after what we've been seeing, we _should_ go there."

Dean gave him a look.

Yeah. Sam didn't believe it either. After all he had been through, after all he and Dean had seen, maybe they _shouldn't_ go to that house. But….

"Whatever happened to your feeling, Dean? Whatever happened to those nutty Northerners being in trouble?"

Dean sighed and shook his head. "We have twelve hours before we need to meet them, Sammy, and just look at the state you're in. You had a panic attack, kiddo. I'm not sending you out to a house with a Killing Room when you've had a panic attack, when you've talked like you did when you were conked out, because you're liable to get me killed. Or at least horribly disfigured, and that's a fate worse than death."

"I thank you for your concern," Sam said appreciatively, though with a great dollop of sarcasm, "but we can't just sit back and let those Yankees get snubbed – that room being fact or fiction notwithstanding."

Dip your lady, doe-si-doe, trade them brothers 'round her beau. The brothers had traded places again.

"Sammy, do you have any idea of the things you were saying? I'm not letting you into that house when you were screaming for Mom to take the gut-spilling baby from your arms, when you kept yelling at her that some lady's eaten her own skin off. Again, you'll do something stupid that'll get me whacked."

Sam, softly started speaking without looking away from his bed comforter. "But it wasn't Mom, Dean. At first I thought it was, but it wasn't, I guess not even the heartbeat I felt on the doorknob." He took no notice that his brother wouldn't understand that latter part. "She looked like Mom, but it was D'avianna Longbourgh I know it. It was D'avianna who handed me the baby that _was_ me – up until the point it started shrieking in mutilated little gasps, anyway – and it was D'avianna who had skinned herself alive by teeth."

For a moment the elder Winchester brother remained in silence, the motel notepad resuming its thunk-thunk-thunking against the wooden desk. Then, with a shuddering breath: "That name," he started hesitantly. "The name, Longhbourgh, you said it before you blacked out and kept mumbling it in your dreams. It was on the board, Sammy. D'avianna's name was the first name I saw on the menu board. While you were asleep I tried to search for it, but nothing came up."

Sam looked up, met his older brother's deathly pale face. "You know what this means," he implied lightly.

Dean tossed the notepad onto the desk. "Yes," he hissed. "God dammit, yes."


	7. Seven

It picks up toward the end (actually, at the beginning of the next chapter seeing as how this has suddenly turned into ten pages). I would have gone back and fixed up the beginning, but you people have waited long enough. On a side note, there's a quick mention of "Nightmare" in here, though nothing after "Faith" pertains to this story.

**Chapter Seven: Play a Game With Me**

_(and so commences hour one...)_

The brothers Winchester had bought the necessary "creeping" supplies at a nearby hardware store, under the googly eyes of the part-time cashier, Libby. Maybe because she had been so tripped up over Dean, the ghost hunters had been able to buy their Indiana Jones gear without much suspicion – a heck of a lot of eye batting, but hardly any suspicion.

The clerk in the hotel lobby, however, didn't fall victim to Dean's rugged good-looks. Perhaps he was more of a John Winchester type of fellow; the dark hair, the enigmatic eyes, the perpetual "either I'm a drunk or haven't slept in ten days, or both" thing going on. Whatever the reason for not falling prey to Mr. McDreamy, Clark the Clerk (as identified by his golden name tag) had deadly venom seeping from his eyes. They were narrow emerald pools, watching the brothers walk into the hotel on a chilly afternoon with a perfectly honed expression of wary suspicion. By that gleam in Clark the Clerk's eyes alone, one would assume the brothers were no-good nicks aiming to torch the place. Dean's charismatic smile, glued onto his face like a cheesy mask, only worsened those suspicions – and woke a sleeping beast in Sam's belly.

That smile had so often been a deterrent for whatever punishment had been about to be laid down upon the youngest brother; from broken vases to dented Impala doors, it was there like a colorful life preserver. For years that smile had saved Sam from the horrors of his father's punishments, from the sheer terror that was an angry John Winchester. Never had the man used a belt or a fist to give a lesson, because those were petty things in comparison to the always preferred _Look_, that single most frightening expression about the eyes any parent could possibly give a child. But now, suddenly, the egomaniacal smile Sam had long ago considered his savior had blown up in Dean's cheeky little face. Something about the heated air of the hotel might have done it, turned the handsome and gleaming smile sour and gaunt upon contact. Whatever the explanation, Sam's lifesaver was gone.

Adrift in the middle of the sea, floating further and further away from rescue, Sam tried not to panic. He calmly watched as Dean sauntered into the Holiday Inn & Suites as if he owned it; as if a brick wall wearing a brown leather jacket (and a petrifyingly worried light in his eyes he hadn't been able to be rid of since Sam's "incident") was the absolute norm; as if every well-to-do hotel lobby needed someone like him in it. But through his calm, Sam had to struggle to keep his body language as cool as possible. Walking behind Dean toward the silver elevator doors without falling on his face was a chore, and for all his struggling attempts of Joe Coolness, he couldn't keep himself from looking hard at Clark the Clerk.

Drawing attention to oneself was a huge no-no, one of the first things Sam had ever learned about the family job. John had drilled it into his kids until a young Sam felt as though his head was going to burst, until he could recite the spiel while standing on his head without a moments hesitation. Now, shuffling across a large carpeted lobby to a white tiled corridor in the distance, the long repressed words began to come back to him. His father's speech flew to Sam like a butterfly in a drowsy haze, barrel rolling and corkscrewing toward his face with the drive of a Dutch speed skater on the short track.

Staring at Clark the Clerk far too intently for his own good, Sam took blind and sluggish steps toward the elevators, hating himself for being able to remember so much from his childhood – more importantly, his childhood with the _vater_ bits in it. To Sam, hearing his father's voice slowly but surely overlaying the current world, was akin to finding a vein in his order of chicken nuggets.

"_Sammy boy,"_ John acknowledged firmly, his perpetual half whiny, half drunk-with-the-desire-for-revenge voice tainting the atmosphere of the Holiday Inn & Suites. _"Sammy, put down the book for a second and look over here."_ It was more than tainting, actually; his father's voice was in effect dimming the lights on the world.

Sam might have stopped walking; he wasn't all that sure and didn't want to hold up everything to check. So he might have stopped walking and focused harder on Clark the Clerk, at how the desk man was standing beneath the room key board with the queerest look on his face. Clark the Clerk's green eyes weren't anymore narrow and suspicious, but… amused? No, that wasn't the right word. Sam tilted his head ever so slightly, not seeing the desk man at all anymore. He didn't see his father, either – heard the old man, yes, but saw something else entirely. If his mind hadn't gone completely blank, Sam would have started questioning his whereabouts.

"_Over there by the fence, do you see it?"_

Had he been aware of anything around him, Sam would have shrugged his shoulders and mentioned that there wasn't any fence around to behold. Cinder block walls painted a deep red color, a vast wasteland of rough looking carpet, a few metal supporting poles, but not a single fence.

"_The rabbit, kiddo. There's a bunny rabbit hunkered down by the hole in that fence over there, in the shadow of Miss Greene's rose bush. He's munching on some of the birdseed from your Pepsi bottle, Sammy, can you see him now?"_

There wasn't a bunny rabbit to be had, either, at least not where Sam was looking. Off to his left was the deep red and grey-blue carpeted rumpus room, to his right an unused woodworking area. A bunny munching on the droppings of a soda bottle bird feeder didn't appear to be anywhere in those places. But there was one spot of basement left to look.

"_Well, Sammy, I don't know. I just assume it's a boy, but that's not the point. Do you see how attentive he is? How he's eating out in the open, yeah, in the sunlight, but his back's so rigid? He's jumping at the slightest noise, some you can't even hear, and'll sometimes go back under Miss Greene's rosebush for a while before coming back out again?"_

In place of a pretty yellow rosebush to hide behind, the "rabbit" here had what looked to be the stage kid's equivalent to a theatre curtain. It was a pilling red velvet curtain, hanging slacken on a rod to cover what might have amounted to be either a storage alcove without a door or the childrens' playhouse. Whichever it was, there was a pair of paranoid Chuck Taylors to be seen below the short curtain's hem line. They were monochrome black, planted far apart from each other to reveal a tiny pair of pink Barbie tennis shoes some distance away from the Chucks.

"_That's what you need to be like, kiddo: aware to the point of paranoia. That's the only way to be safe in this world, to make sure you don't draw more attention to yourself than need be. Doing what I do, Sammy, doing what I've been teaching you and Dean to do, you can't take a single risk. The key to this game is being just like a rabbit, just as observant and precocious, because if you aren't… it'll be exactly like if that rabbit went too far out in the open and stopped being so cautious. Sammy boy, there are a lot of things out there that'll try to hurt you, but if you're like a rabbit – if you try to be as invisible as you possibly can – you won't ever get yourself killed._

"_There's nothing to be gained being the brazen wolf, Sammy. Not with you. But everything to be lost being like that rabbit over there. Invisibility is key, do you understand that? The less people remember about you the better, son; you need to be the detail in their memories that can easily be pushed out of their minds by something else, something small as a grain of sand. Aim for that, boy. Aim for being the tiniest speck of matter that'll blow out of their memory faster than a tumbleweed in a tornado."_

Something then struck Samuel Winchester forcefully at the back of his head, something cold and hard and quite possibly labeled "wrong" or "off" or "deeply screwed up". The blow happened as he looked at the cautious shoes peeping out from beneath the pilling velvet curtain, as he heard his father recite one of the millions of sayings to be found in the south. It rattled his brain hard enough to bring him screeching back into the real world.

Blinking twice, three times, Sam realized that he had indeed stopped walking. He was staring at the desk man like some freak at the zoo, some freak at the zoo who was no doubt going to self-destruct at any given moment. But that desk man, hair greased back and ugly uniform starched to perfection, still didn't seem to notice the behemoth now jogging to catch up to the object of his, Clark the Clerk's, fascination. Sam supposed that was a good thing, not having the laser heat of his staring eyes popping up on any notice board. Good thing or not, however, Sam wanted to be noticed just then – wanted with a primitive urge to have Clark the Clerk jerk his head to the right and scream out "What the fuck are you looking at, freak show?" with everything the desk man had in his shrimp of a frame. But thanks to Dean and his now suspect smile, Mr. Clerk was far too busy mean mugging the eldest Winchester brother to take into account what Sam had most reluctantly learned.

How he had gotten this information Sam didn't know, didn't exactly _want_ to know either, but the kernel of knowledge caught at the back of his throat was something he did know. Sam, the poor schmuck splitting at the seams with psychic ability, had somehow – just by noticing the glint in the desk clerk's eyes, perhaps – _someway _taken a time warp back a few decades and had come across a bit of rather disturbing news.

The news, vile and disgusting and _wrong_, stuck with him now like a bad movie. It played on fast forward before his mind's eye, Sam grimacing and beginning to turn his head in order to study the back of his brother's hair-do.

At the front counter, just as a frightened six-year-old girl stood under the abusive glare of a disturbed brother's cam-corder, the hotel room keys began jumping from their pegs with angry screams, one mint green card at a time. They rained down on Clark the Clerk in enraged sheets, pelting him and slicing him with their plastic edges, as the younger Clark Thoms pleasured himself behind that camera – as a dead faced Sue Ann played a twisted game with her big brother in the family basement.

The grown-up Clark Thoms, the one with the greased back hair and starched work uniform, shrieked loudly.

Biting his tongue, Sam continued walking with an absent face to the elevator, pushing the arrow button closest to his hand. Dean, on the other hand, had turned around the moment he had heard the desk clerk's high-pitched protests, now cowering behind the desk with his cut and bleeding arms held over his head. The other people in the lobby, too, were watching in astonishment as Clark the Clerk received the pummeling brunt of the possessed keys' rage. Even when it was over, not too long after that first shriek, the witnesses stood with open mouths and inquiring eyes.

Sam heard Dean breathe loudly, a perturbed sound a wild stallion might make, and hustle over to his younger brother. In the dull, distorted reflection of the elevator doors, the brunette saw the _fear_ on his brother's face, saw the anger lying not too far beneath, and sighed quietly before Dean could begin saying anything.

"Play a game with me," he recited softly. "Give me your hand and—"

The elevator doors slid open with a dinging sound.

Almost as if walking on a cloud, Sam glided into the elevator. He turned around to face the lobby, saw a very shaken up Clark Thoms trying to explain what had happened to his questioning audience – some of them looking back to get a second look at the brazen wolf Samuel Winchester. Smiling at the image of a scared and whimpering desk clerk, Sam pressed the button for floor three on the control panel.

Boots clunking against the linoleum elevator floor, Dean bared his teeth angrily and waved a hand toward the lobby. When the doors closed, he began to yell without any worry of drawing attention to himself. "I must be more of an idiot than I thought," he said, close enough to spay spittle onto Sam's face, "but I thought that you could only futz around with hotel pens! I don't want to see you do anymore of that, do you hear me?"

"Anymore of what?" Sam asked vaguely, eyes alight much like a neon Vacancy sign.

Dean guffawed, backing up and throwing his arms out into the elevation cabin in frustration. "I don't think those keys attacked that guy all by themselves, Sammy."

"There must be a haunting here," he replied flatly. "Huh. We just can't seem to get away from the spooks, can we?"

Dean rolled his eyes too much. One of these days, Sam had always betted on, his brother's eyes would snap free of their rigging and go forever spinning around in their sockets.

"What's going on with you, Sammy?" the blonde asked, tone of voice slipping from P.Oed to worried sick. "First you see blood in the shower and now you're attacking people with room keys? God, if we're not careful you're going to lock me in the Impala in some random garage, turn on the engine. Worse, you'll drive a knife through my eye! I like my eyes, Sammy. They're a beautiful shade of hazel and if you _ever_ screw that up…," he waved at his brother with the back of his hand, as if to prove a point. Possibly because he needed the ego boost, he took Sam's pale face as a sign of comprehension.

Inadvertently and not because of the threat, Sam let his entire body fall victim to a shudder. It seemed to start at his very core, at the small part of him still holding onto the hope that Jessica didn't really hate him; at the minute crumb of agonizing faith that – oh, God, please – Jessica still loved him even after that shared glance of painful understanding, right before he screamed and she left the world like some kind of beautiful fire cracker. The shudder went from that core and spread to his fingers and toes, the tips of his hair, and froze all it came across in its travels. Or so it felt, for Sam was able to shut his eyes tightly and bite his lip. He wished he knew what in the world was happening to him, too. But he didn't, not at all, and so he said nothing in answer to his brother's main question. _"What's going on with you, Sammy?"_ He hadn't a bleeding clue, thank you very much.

For the moment Sam didn't feel his brother's prodding stick poke at him in the ribs; both of the ghost busting men remained silent for the remainder of the elevator ride. When the cab stopped and as the doors slid open with that all too familiar dinging sound, Sam let out a pent-up breath through his nose. He opened his eyes and dropped his jaw, scurrying out of the moving coffin with a Silly Walk straight out of a Monty Python skit.

"Sammy?" Dean started up again, clunking out of the death trap with weights and pulleys behind his brother.

Sam brought his hands up to his head, rubbed his temples feebly. He felt utterly detached. "I saw something when I looked at him, all right? I saw something and it made me sick, it made me angry. It was either the room keys or the entire place falling down on his head."

His brother's explanation chilled Dean to the soul, destroyed any rationality that Sam could only be brought to _that kind_ of violence through possession. That belief being shot down for a fiery visitation with the sea was jolting, was unnerving, was horrendously frightening.

"See? Didn't I tell you this was a bad idea, coming here? Come on, it's not too late. We'll just turn around and go back to our motel room, back to

(_"the make-believe notion that you can forever be the only innocent thing in this world."_)

our beds."

Sam liked that idea, liked it a lot, but was man enough to admit to himself that it wasn't ever going to happen – not yet at least. Something strange was happening to him, from flying card keys to dinner dates with fire demons, and running back to bed wouldn't reverse anything. Hiding under the covers and acting like none of this had ever happened wouldn't actually change a thing. Sleeping forever certainly wouldn't help things either, not when the word sleep didn't stop long enough to really sink into Sam's mind. Since his "incident", sleep hadn't really hung around long enough for him to be romanced by the whole concept of slumber. To Sam, maybe lying on his left side in his motel bed with the covers pulled up to his ears, sleep wasn't anything to be sweet on. To Sam, sleep was the enemy. Sleep was a ghastly thing waiting to rot his brain with all the horrors known to the underworld. Sleep opened all the windows and let the bad things in.

With a sigh, he shook his head. "You know as well as I do that we can't."

There was a scene missing completely from Sam's point of view movie montage. Dean looked longingly at the back of his kid brother's head, eyes wary and old. He mouthed with distaste and sadness "But it's going to kill you, Sammy. It's going to kill you", and it was evident the thought pained him deeply.

"Dammit," the blonde huffed angrily and marched past Sam. Arrogance and sarcastic humor had long ago become walls of protection in times of crisis. "When we're through with putting our asses on the line for these fruitcake Northerners, remind me to take this up with the Union. I don't get paid damn near enough for this."

"You and me both," Sam agreed.

Dean had been three doors away from the elevator when his brother said that. Dropping his shoulders, he turned around to look at the downright frightening image of his brother. The kid almost looked anorexic – what with the sunken eyes and bony contours of his face. But, then again, when was the last time Sam had eaten like he used to? When was the last time Sammy Boy had ordered two full orders of breakfast at Denny's, had bought an entire shopping bag full of snacks for himself and only a chocolate bar for his companion?

Clearing his throat, Dean looked away from Sam and began to turn back around, all with the screaming tell-tale signs of awkward uncomfort. He pulled the Winchester duffel bag higher up on his right shoulder, started a labored walk to room thirty-one. "So what'cha see, anyway?"

Sam moved his left hand away from his head. Before letting it rest at his side he stole a glance from it, took into account the eerie way the skin seemed to be stretched to thin translucence. "Something bad. I wouldn't have sent the room cards on him if it hadn't been something bad."

"Naturally. You're not the type to attack people for putting on mismatched socks."

All the hotel rooms on the third floor were on the left side of the hallway, the right side occupied by an endless wall of windows. Sam looked out of those windows, down toward the lobby desk and the crowd still gathered around Clark Thoms, Sick Puppy _Numero Uno_. "I would have gotten rid of you a long time ago if I was the type."

"My mismatched socks are a fashion statement, buddy. It'll catch on, just you wait," Dean replied, stopping in front of a door with the hypnotizing view of the lobby's revolving doors.

"Sorry, I can't," Sam retorted, coming to a stop beside his brother. "I have a date with the barrel of a shotgun that day."

Dean punched the brunette's shoulder, forcefully. "Don't joke about things like that, Sammy. Now, knock on the door like a good boy. You've had more practice with the knock than I have, drumming on my bedroom wall until the sun rose."

Sam sneered and knocked on the door, _Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits_.

Funny thing about hotel doors, they're surprisingly thin – possibly the reason not many mobsters chose to whack anyone inside hotel rooms. They might post someone outside the door and listen in on conversations, as Sam was doing while waiting for one of the Creepers to allow he and his brother entrance into room thirty-one.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything exciting to overhear apart from hushing noises and dragging footsteps. The chain locking system scraped against the door, causing Sam to back away from it – one step, two, three. He slipped his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to the ground, stared at a dark spot of wet carpet below the door. There was a feeling emanating from that door, a kind of lavender scented unknown that suddenly spooked him. A knot formed in his stomach, a pulsating thing reminding Sam that something definitely wasn't right with the world, wasn't right with _him_.

Rolling his shoulders, trying to force the feeling to pass, Sam raised his head back to the door when it opened with an audible _whoosh_. He wasn't all that happy to see Monique standing there, her hair tied up in a high pony tail and a too wide smile on her face. "Boys," she said happily. "Right on time!"

Dean's smile was back to normal. Though she was spoken for, Monique tilted her head in a schoolgirl fashion and began leaning against the hotel door. "Well," he said, "that's us. Early for _everything_, right Sammy?" Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Say no more, say no more.

"Screw you," the brunette snapped.

His smile brightening into a wide grin, Dean winked crudely and turned back to the urban explorer. He tugged at the duffel bag on his shoulder. "We almost didn't get everything. I had to fight an old woman for the last 'anti-terrorism' gas mask."

Monique laughed, a sound much like a crackling autumn leaf. "Yeah, all that Apocalypse Hysteria Syndrome is really cramping our style. You'd think it'd be over by now," she complained, walking back into the hotel room with the brothers Winchester following behind (but not before Sam stomped his feet twelve times; six on the left foot, six on the right).

Sam's first impression of the hotel room, apart from it having an even heavier smell of lavender death than first noticed outside, was that every last costumer to the hotel establishment should sue – Holiday Inn & Suites it most certainly wasn't.

Upon walking through the door, Sam found himself in a small living room. From his resting spot on the couch, legs flung over one of the arms, Steve waved to him with one hand and pressed a button on the television remote with the other – and suddenly, from Sam's right side, blasting guns sounded.

Looking to his brother, they exchanged a _"What I'd tell ya?"_ glance: on the television nestled in the cherry armoire, kicking serious Nazi ass, was none other than Indiana Jones. Laughing, Sam looked down a short hallway (bathroom on the left, connecting door to the other hotel room on the right) and into the bedroom. What he saw there stopped his amusement, drew him toward the large bed like a mouse to a fine slice of cheese.

Monique had joined up with her Gothic mob boss/body-builder boyfriend and, together, they stared down at the bed with most bemused expressions on their faces. Maps, carbon monoxide detectors, walkie-talkies, and more, all piled high on the bed clothes and ready to be packed up and shipped off.

Christ, these people weren't only nutty – they were serious.

Dean came up behind the too-thin brunette, muttering something inaudible. He had just come into Sam's field of vision when Chuck started walking toward them, a broad grin on his face. "This won't take long, guys, and then we can get going." The brothers looked at each other quickly before being herded off by Chuck into the "living room". They were pushed down onto the couch beside Steve, Dean almost literally bouncing back off the cushions to walk over by the television. It was obvious the blonde wanted to keep a closer eye on the bedroom – on the urban exploring supplies or on Monique Sam couldn't guess.

Turning around the room in a small circle, Chuck made sure everyone was in the designated congregation area. They were and he smiled, waving at Steve to shut the television off.

Steve rolled his eyes and muted the action movie.

Outside the hotel room's one window, and much to Sam's unease, an ominous bought of thundersnow began rolling into Tulsa, Oklahoma. As fluffy white flakes hit the window pane, melting against it, thunder shook the glass.


	8. Eight

**Chapter Eight: Cloak and Dagger**

Stanford – and California in general – had a way with the mind. It could with ease take a paintbrush and perfect the finer details of memory, like an impressionist era great (Degas, perhaps) might touch up his life's work. Even living on the west coast for such a short amount of time, Sam had nearly forgotten all about thundersnow – in fact, until he was looking right at the weather event, he would have thought it never existed.

_Thundersnow_? No, that's not at all possible, he would have said with a hearty laugh. But now, staring at the phenomena with the help of the television screen, had Sam ever denounced the reality, he would have been forced to eat his words. As long as that wasn't happening – as long as Sam wasn't being forced to eat a rather large bowl of Words by a gun to the head – he took casual relaxation in watching the thundersnow through the dark spots of movie scene. And not only was it relaxing, it helped to fade out Chuck and his parental meanderings; "There's several baggies of trail mix on the bathroom counter, so help yourselves"; "I hope everyone's remembered to bring along an extra pair of socks"; "If you have to piss, do it _before_ we leave. Steve, I mean you. We don't want a repeat of the Fargo incident."

To this, Steve kicked the backs of his black boots against the couch arm. "Fuck you. How was I suppos'a know you were gonna get us lost – for _four_ hours?"

Chuck, unperturbed, shrugged. "I told you to not drink all those Red Bulls, man."

Mohawk crossed his arms over his chest, repeating what the group leader had said in a teenager-ish whine. "Next time," he then grumbled, "I hope you're the one who gets Poison Oak."

"That'll be kinda tough," Chuck recanted. "I know better then to walk straight into a patch of the stuff. See, I'm _attentive_."

Steve scoffed. "Attentive my ass. Even if Mon pointed it out to you, you wouldn't know where to stick your–"

"Get on with it," Monique demanded harshly.

As Sam stared at the television screen – watching without really watching Dr. Jones Sr. slowly die from a bullet to the chest – he began to recall another of his childhood memories. This, unlike the other in the hotel lobby, was welcomed into the world with open arms. Sam even smiled softly as the thunder and snow (plinking crisply against the window) sounded sheepishly throughout the so-called hotel suite, driving forward the recollection of a normal night some twelve years past. In the reflection of that television screen glass, slowly overlaying the movie and the people grouped together in the room much like an impromptu Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a scene of long lost joy tuned into the subconscious.

_The living room of the not-so-new-but-mostly-uncharred Winchester residence, like every other room but one, was a complete and total mess. On its best of days it looked as if a twister had rolled through the area, and even then it was nigh impossible for two boys to stand comfortably by the big picture window. Somehow, though, they would find a way to manage and had been doing so for the past fifteen minutes. And Dean Winchester, for the whole of that time, had been trying to convince little Sammy – who wasn't by any means so little anymore – that the world was coming to an end. A snowy, thundery end. If _that_ didn't happen, the elder contrived, the thundersnow would seek out little Sammy and kill him._

_Little Samuel Winchester, of course, wasn't at all persuaded. "Keep telling stories like that and you'll never get passed the sixth grade, doofus."_

"_Go outside then, smartass," Dean shot back, shoving his younger brother in the direction of the front door. "Go outside and see what really happens, unless you're too scared."_

_Sammy rolled his eyes and sighed as only six-year-olds can do. "I can't be scared if I don't believe it's gonna happen."_

"_Stop stalling, Sammy, and do it."_

"_I am not_ _stalling," the young brunette stated simply. "I just don't want to go outside when I'm still slippery from my bath. You know what Daddy'll say. You know he'll say I'll get new…__ nn-eew… nn-eew – a really bad cold."_

_Dean scoffed, wriggling his way between two boxes in order to see better out of the dusty window. "Whatever. You're stalling."_

"_Why don't _you_ go out there and do it, if you know so much?"_

"_Because I'm the firstborn, idiot. Firstborns never have to go outside in killer thundersnow, it's just the way it is." After a short pause: "It's written in The Book."_

_Sammy's face scrunched up in disbelief. "What book?"_

"_The Book, Sammy. _The _Book."_

"_You mean the Bible Daddy uses for target practice?"_

"_No, stupid, not that book. I'm talking about the book under Dad's bed… the one with recipes for little brother stew in it."_

_As Dean began to grin, Sammy started to lose his cool. "I don't believe you. You're lying!"_

_Grinning broadly now, Dean shook his head. "I'll show it to you – if the thundersnow doesn't kill you first that is. Trust me, it's in there; a big chapter all about cooking Sammy Winchester."_

_Frowning, his bottom lip jutting out further than his doll-ish nose, Sammy screamed. "Daddy!" He stared at Dean with wide, watery aquamarine eyes. "You're a liar – DADDY!"_

_And Daddy came tumbling into the room from the kitchen, chicken scratch papers and a thick library book falling from his arms onto the living room floor. John Winchester, tripping over said notes and book, ran toward his frightened son as fast as the MachFive twister-struck room would allow. Naturally, with junk in all forms piled all over the place, fast wasn't fast at all. But, eventually, John made it to the picture window and scooped Sammy away from whatever danger had presented itself. Holding his youngest son up by the armpits, his footy pajamed feet dangling in the air, John locked his deathly worried eyes on his baby boy._

_Sammy was beginning to cry. Sniffling, he blinked large tears out of his eyes. "You wouldn't eat me, Daddy, would you?"_

_John could only gape, seemed to be verbally immobilized by his son's ludicrous question. Shaking his head, mouth hanging open like a broken door, he set Sammy down on the ground. Buying for time, he helped to straighten the boy's favorite blue-and-white pajamas. When the Kansas City Royals insignia on the left breast was all in order, John was out of what little time he had had. "No. Honey, no. Where on earth did you–" Sighing loudly through his nose, John shut his eyes. "Dean?" He nodded in answer to his own question, opened his eyes again to address his frightened little boy._

"_He said the thundersnow was a sign of the lisp, Daddy. He said that if I went out there it would kill me. I didn't believe him. But then he said you had _The Book_, Daddy, the one with the stew recipe in it."_

_John leaned back on his squatted haunches to better look Sammy in the eyes. Smiling, dimples forming in his stubbed cheeks, he put a comforting hand on his son's shoulder. "My brave boy, you are, Sammy," he said in his trademark dry, insomniatic voice. _

_The boy's face reverted back to sour skepticism. "I'm not brave if I–"_

_Giving Sammy's shoulder a gentle squeeze, John motioned toward the window with his shinning hazel eyes; eyes so filled with knowledge and awareness they had fascinated Sammy since the boy could remember. "A lot of things out there want to hurt you, but there's nothing in that storm that will. All it is is a thunderstorm without the rain. There's snow instead. I know it's strange, snow in place of rain, but it happens sometimes."_

"_But Dean said–"_

"_That eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coca-Cola will make your stomach explode. You know how we resolved that issue, don't you?" John patted his stomach with his free hand. "I'm still here. So why don't you go outside and prove your brother wrong again? You know he can't understand things any other way." He winked one of his wise eyes at Sammy._

_Almost gaily, the little boy nodded his head in understanding. Dean, meanwhile, hollered in protest to the joke. _

_Standing up, John smiled at his youngest child before – again – picking him up by the underarms. This time, however, father swung son around in a circle before resting the knobby boy on his right hip. "Hush-up, Dean, and get your things."_

_Groaning, Dean backed-up out of the box filled window alcove. He walked to the coat closet mumbling and dragging his heels, returning to the living room minutes later with equal emotion – practically shoving Sammy's tiny winter jacket into this father's waiting hand._

"_Looks like someone needs a nap, huh, Sammy?" John asked, passing the coat onto its slightly puffy-eyed owner._

_Giggling, Sammy carefully and methodically put on his dark blue starter jacket (pulling up the zipper, then tapping each metal snap he fastened four times with his small right first). From the "Kanga pouch", Sammy pulled out a pair of white mittens, a matching white hat, and put the accessories on. With his mitted right hand, the boy tapped the hat's yarn tassel four times, just as he had done with the jacket snaps. _

"_Okay," Sammy said when he was finished. _

"_Okay," John repeated cheerfully, or at least as cheerfully as the man could muster – in hindsight, to Sam, it didn't seem too cheerful at all. It appeared more haunted than anything else, a mere ghost of what a happy John Winchester might look. But he acted, anyway, and carried little Sammy out of the house behind a sulky Dean. _

_Outside, naturally, the storm was louder. It unsettled Sammy enough for the young boy to cling on tighter to his father – to not only make sure the thundersnow wouldn't really kill him, but also to be sure John wasn't going to abandon him for the man's ever present journal or witchy books. So far, neither of Sammy's worries came to fruition, and he was able to relax if only slightly. He looked over to Dean, standing with his hands in his pockets and kicking at the fresh coat of driveway snow with one of his sneakers, then to his father. _

_John put Sammy down apprehensively, motioning with his hand for the youngest Winchester man to stay put. Looking back to his boys once, twice on his way back toward the house, John went inside to (Sammy had hoped) fetch the boy his boots._

_The baby looked down at his feet, housed in the booties of his beloved Royals pajamas – though Sammy was getting to be a little too old for footy pajamas, if he did say so himself. He wriggled his toes, watching the fuzzy flannel material of his juvenile sleepwear roll like dark blue waves. Frowning at the embarrassment of it all (what if his classmate, Amber Chomsky should come by and see him like this?), Sammy bent down and scooped up a handsful of freshly fallen snow._

_The white stuff, a dull coolness through Sammy's mittens, was packing snow in its finest. The frozen water molecules easily conformed to the shape of Sammy's enclosed hands, soon becoming the perfect snowball after a smoothing off and dusting. He threw this perfect snowball the way his favorite pitcher Mark Davis – number 48, a number easily divisible by two without an odd number to be had (2, 24, 48) – might throw a baseball. Unlike Mark Davis, though, Sammy didn't have the lubricated movements of the MLB man and missed his spot. Instead of hitting Dean square in the back of the head like he had set out to do, Sammy's snowball smacked him in the lower back. Not with much force, either._

_Sammy laughed anyway, clamping his hands over his mouth to muffle some of his braying and to hide his missing-teeth smile._

_Dean wasn't so amused, however. He turned around slowly, a vacant look on his face, and narrowed his eyes at his sibling. "Why you little…."_

_Sammy snorted loudly behind his hands._

"_I'm gonna get you for that," Dean threatened. He looked down at the ground, twirling himself around like a top before stopping himself. Quickly grabbing up some snow from a nearby drift with his bare hands, Dean formed a half-hazard snowball and chucked it at his brother. _

_Squealing with delight, Sammy jumped out of the way. The snowball narrowly missed him, but he lost his balance and fell down into a sizeable snow drift in the corner formed by the meeting of house and garage. He flailed his legs and arms, but was too small to get himself out._

"_Man, Sammy, I'm sorry," Dean apologized, stressing the word sorry beyond what was necessary. He jogged over to his little brother and extended his arms, taking each of Sammy's hands in both his own. "Here, let me help you up."_

_Nose already beginning to run from the cold, Sammy gratefully allowed his brother to pull him out of the large snow drift – but greatly made his objection known when Dean pushed him back into that loose snow pile. In the well-known shriek of all young children, Sammy shouted a swearword long sugarcoated by PBS._

_Tittering like an evil church mouse, Dean bent forward and yanked his brother to his feet again. This time, thankfully enough, the eleven-year-old chose not to overuse a good trick – he pulled Sammy's hat down around the boy's eyes instead._

"_HEY!" Sammy set his white mitted hands on either side of his head, righted his hat. Now able to look at his brother, he did so and – upon seeing the expression on the elder's face – matched Dean's grin with exuberance. "That isn't fair."_

"_I hate to break it to you, little brother–" Dean bent down and took up a fistful of snow "–but everything's fair in love and snowball fights." As with his homework, Dean didn't take the time to perfect his snowball. He tossed the misshapen blob at the crown of Sammy's head and took off running, laughing as he progressed awkwardly deeper into the front yard. Lightening crackled and thunder boomed above his head._

_Harrumphing, Sammy started off after his brother. Even though he was tall for his age, he was still six-years-old – traveling through the rapidly mounting snow of flat land Kansas, Sammy teetered much like an amateur clown on stilts. It wasn't an easy thing to do, plowing through the yard after Dean while acting like a piece of construction equipment. Scoop up snow and throw the ball at Dean; scoop and throw, scoop and throw, scoop and throw. He wasn't very good at it either, for every one hit Sammy got, Dean got two. _

_But it was fun. Even numb from the cold with a runny nose and snow dripping down his jacket collar, it was fun. It might not have been to John, standing on the front stoop yelling at his youngest to put his boots on before hypothermia of the tootsies set in, but to Sammy nothing else seemed to come close to fun than that moment. It was fun, having a snowball fight in the front yard against a typical older brother. And for the first time in a long time he was a normal kid. For the first time in a long time he didn't have to sneak off to a friend's house to forget and be a _normal _kid._

A bright light brought a twenty-something Sam Winchester back into the real world, a bright ball of light aimed right at his eyes. Squinting as he looked away from the television set, he slowly came into focus.

Chuck, the Gothic mob boss/bodybuilder, was still standing in the middle of the hotel suite's living room. Apart from one raised eyebrow, the one with the scar cutting through the middle of it, he seemed relatively calm. Of course, to Sam's belief, calm people don't shine lights into others' eyes.

Grunting, Sam shifted positions on the couch.

After a rather happy inhalation of breath, Chuck turned back to the address rest of the mock AA group. He switched off the battery powered light he was holding, the hard hat it was attached to cradled in the man's large hands, and set it on the nearby desk. "All right, we've gone through the boring stuff. Now that that's over with – Monique, if you'd be so kind."

She was sitting reverse in the desk chair, her arms folded and resting on the back, and she didn't move out of the position to speak. Glaring quickly at Sam, she turned her head to acknowledge her beau. "Snow showers should be letting up around midnight, the weathermen saying the accumulation will be moderate – four, five inches. We should be okay if we leave earlier, seeing how it looks worse than everyone said it'd be. It looks like some real wet crap out there, so if we leave at five and take it slow…."

Chuck nodded. "We'll stick to the original plan going down, but we'll see how it is coming back. Steve?"

He was no longer draped over the couch arm, but sitting normally on the cushions. "Sunday night in a small town. We should be okay," he said.

"Right," Chuck exclaimed, clapping and rubbing his hands together. "I think we've covered all we need to cover. Just one more thing and we can ship out early."

Sighing, Sam leaned back into the couch. He stared at Indiana Jones on mute, trying to choose between taking his father's other hand or plunging to his death after the Holy Grail, and listened to Chuck walk off into the bedroom. There was the thud of heavily dropping knees and the screeching of an opening dresser drawer. Several objects were being lifted out of that drawer, making hollow noises on their journey, but for the moment Sam couldn't tell what those items were.

Resting his head on the back of the couch, Sam looked up to the ceiling. He didn't like what he was getting himself into. All he wanted was to run away from Tulsa, Oklahoma and continue on down to Texas and face a ghost train. Most of all, he wanted to forget about what was happening to him and once again spend a cold night with Jessica deep under the bed covers. But a day like that was too dead to bring back. Every so often he'd be able to bring up an image (some sort of sad compensation), but it was marred and yellowed and torn beyond much recognition.

With a frown, Sam moved his heavy head to look toward the television again.

For a span of two seconds, Sam thought he must have fallen asleep or zoned out again, like he had at the Dairy Queen or in the hotel suite not twenty minutes ago. But then he saw Dean, leaning up against the armoire and shaking his head – _"Sorry, Sammy. I only wish you _were _dreaming again"_ – and that stomped out any hope of fantasy.

He wasn't seeing things this time.

Chuck really _was _standing in the middle of the living area with a half dozen or more rifles in his arms. A half dozen frighteningly long, wooden rifles that surely had to have been a joke. They'd never be able to smuggle those rifles out of the building, so surely they ought to be prop guns – really, horribly authentic looking _toys_. BB guns, that was all they really were, not the first cousins to those disgusting Nazi rifles shown in the very movie now playing closing credits on mute. But, no, they were real all right. Real to the point of a sack of ammunition hanging from Chuck's closed right hand.

The Gothic giant turned his head to look hard at Sam's agog reaction to the armful of rifles. He laughed and raised his gigantic arms just so, just enough to signal to his girlfriend to pass the death machines around. "We didn't mention guns to you, did we?" he asked as Monique began taking the rifles – one at a time – and passing them about the room. She went to Sam first.

"Daydreaming or not, I think I would have remembered talk of a German Mauser. A K-98 no less," he replied distantly. Throwing an uncharacteristically frantic look at his brother, Sam swallowed thickly.

"Well," Monique started, moving on to Steve, "if we had told you guys we'd be running around with an eighth of my late father's gun collection, would you have agreed to come?"

Dean didn't move his eyes from his kid brother for a long time. In fact, he would have kept a visual tab on Sam until he keeled over had Monique not delivered a rifle to him. He smiled at her broadly. "Of course we would. But, you know, Sammy and I have our own small collection…."

Steve rubbed the stock of his gun, rubbed it like Sam or Dean would have caressed a woman. He was grinning as he said, "It's safer this way. Tha guns are old, unregistered, fur one. Tha bullets and casings provide easier clean-up, too…. Y'know, if need be."

As if driven to, the lanky brunette on the sofa stared down at the old death machine in his lap. Why would _urban explorers_ need rifles longer than Sam's femur? Did they expect to come across a fowl tempered fainting couch?

Samuel Winchester was starting to get a bad feeling about this, a very bad feeling indeed.


	9. Nine

**Chapter Nine: The World Has Teeth**

Clark the Clerk was no longer up and running at the front desk; there was a big neon sign with a fussy, blinking "vacancy" set on the counter in his place. In fact, if Samuel Winchester hadn't been the one to send a wave of carnivorous key cards at the slimy bastard—it could have been as though nothing strange had happened in the Holiday Inn lobby at all. _Could have been_ being the operative phrase.

The mint green key cards had been scooped up from the floor—surgically removed from Clark the Clerk's skin—and returned back to their modest, wooden peg board abode. What few droplets of blood that had screamed out of the desk man's war wounds had been cleaned up with a damp rag or two, or three. Googly eyes had returned to normal size and followed their owners to wherever or whatever it was they had been doing prior to the wondrous psychological phenomena they had witnessed. Yes, everything was back in its place—except for the lousy pig the key cards had failed to destroy. In a way that was a good thing; it was impossible for destruction to match that of the rubble that by now was surely Clark Thoms's little sister.

But Sam had tried. Years of bottled anger had mixed with rabid disgust to stretch the confines of Sammy Winchester's skin. It was frightening—what a man could do to another, yes—but what Sam was _capable_ of doing if brought to an action-making stage. It was frightening, how quickly and smoothly The Red could take over every last bulwark of Sam's known mind; how quickly rage—RAGE—gained complete dominance. It was frightening, most of all, how much Sam could enjoy it.

As he followed behind his brother and a group of Nutty Northerners, Sam couldn't help but look toward the lobby's front desk and be reminded of the joy he had felt attacking Clark Thoms, Sister Molester Extraodinaire. He would have liked to smile at that dirt-bag, but said dirt-bag was nowhere to be seen. So all he could do was shrug his golf bag higher up on his shoulder.

Golf bags. Scotland-Highland-Plaid golf bags.

It was either ingenious or incredibly stupid.

And even though his brain was wrought with tension, Sam laughed at the idea of smuggling Death in something so plain and unassuming. It was the laughter of a crazy man, a maniacal cackling, that turned over in his throat like broken glass in a martini tumbler.

Monique, one-fifth of the dancing monkey parade, turned around to scowl at the youngest son of the feared Jonathan Winchester. Scowling did nothing for her looks, which weren't at all soft and angelic under the most normal of circumstances. But she "mean-mugged" Sam, anyway.

Now the old saying went, as far as Sam was aware, that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover. It seemed as though everyone in the world had told him that at least once in his relatively short life; teachers, extended family, plain-looking girls with massive crushes on him. And walking through a hotel lobby, lugging a ridiculously well-preserved German K-98 Mauser in a hideous golf bag, Sam pitied himself for never taking that ugly women's saying to heart.

To quote all of the horrendous thriller flicks out on the market, Sam was in some pretty deep shit.

He had thought something was off when he met this trio of creepers, but had more than half convinced himself the freaky nature of the folks was due to the Yankee emblem on their name tags. Just look where that had gotten him: bringing up the caboose of a line overrun with _assault rifles_. And those assault rifles, or his at least, were growing hotter than the sun itself, burning with foreboding and the unrelenting terror of the unknown. Sooner than later, it was bound to burn its way right out of the golf bag and into Sam's back.

That concept seemed all too comical to him—having the molten hot cousin of a Nazi Germany death-weapon fuse with his pretty little spine. Maybe he could run off and join a freak show, if only they were true to the freak shows of old. _"Ladies_ und _Gentlemen, girls and boys, come and bear witness to God's most horrendous atrocity! Take a risk, take a ride—five cents gets you in the tent to see the boy with a Mauser for a spine. But don't get too close, little lady, or blast-o!" _Here the Carnie from Hell would remove his head and toss it at the beautiful woman in the front row.

Sam giggled and hitched his golf bag strap up higher still.

Monique's eyes were dull and flat, hinting of no underlying intelligence. What silently spewed out of her mouth was a great more evidence of that.

"Can it, you fucking twat! You're drawing too much attention."

"_Too much_ attention?" Sam mouthed back through dying laughter and a smile. "There's no one else in the lobby! And twat? That's so unladylike, sweetheart."

In his mind he did, at least.

On the outside, however, he peeled back his top lip in a crocodile smile. He cocked his head to the left, gaily shrugged his shoulders, and then began to hum the most annoying show tune he could think of. To bother Monique, the redheaded French woman with a major ax to grind; the redheaded French woman who was a serious red flag—no pun intended—to this Yankee Creeper Organization.

As far as Sam was aware, YCO was trying desperately hard to come off as a small group of drugged-crazed baboons. For the most part, they were doing extraordinarily well. _For the most part_, because some things can't be easily controlled. Like a feeling emanating from a door for instance, a kind of lavender scented unknown that instantly put the kibosh on the secrecy of whatever YCO was planning. Well, that and the guns.

The Winchesters needed guns, most definitely, because the odds of fighting off an Incubus with a celery stick without having your skin peeled off like a banana….

But the Creepers? As specified by their name, they crept—or explored urban areas, or trespassed, or just simply broke the law. Monstrous assault rifles were not required. Water pistols, sure, maybe even a popgun for those conniving chipmunks. But everything else was a little far out of the spectrum to be comforting.

Some might consider it a safety precaution, like fire retardant powder in a shock rocker's hair during a stage performance. Far as Sam could tell, this wasn't a knocked-up rendition of the Veggie Tales Bunny Song. Had it been a Wiggles number, he might have considered it. Because The Wiggles gave him the heebe-jeebies, plain and simple; something about a group of four grown men singing for children, calling themselves the _wiggles_ for Christ's sake—No, vegetables were far less threatening. And Sam had the dark feeling that this was no mildly Christian animated television episode he and his brother had stepped into.

They had just entered a re-shooting of Trent Reznor's very angry "Burn".

How fitting, actually. There was a rifle in that video as well, lying on a blood-speckled linoleum floor.

Or, the horror of all horrors, in several hours' time they would be uncovering the missing scene in the banned "Happiness in Slavery" video. Which had given Sam nightmares for a good three years.

Stepping out into the winter evening, the sunset back-lighting busy snowflakes with beautiful shades of orange and red, Sam tried not to let out an audible shriek as images of that last video flooded back into his mind. He would have closed his eyes against the ruby red and candy corn orange snowflakes, but of course that would only make things worse. So he swallowed his stifled yelp, which would have gone unheard over the thunder anyhow, and trekked onward at the back of this Crazy Train.

His feet slipped on the paved ground more than once and he wondered how bad this snow storm really was. He wondered, dusty sections of wet cotton clinging to his sneakers, if Monique had known what she was talking about—if she knew what a moderate, Middle American snow actually was. The answer was: of course she didn't know.

Here, you could roll a bowling ball from Ohio to the Rocky Mountains. Here, the wind came sweeping down the plains. Here, snow drifted and drifted high. Four to five inches, it was only a pain to shovel, but when four to five inches drifted in Middle America you just wished the bars on the windows weren't rusted. Because drifting snow had a weird way of growing, of multiplying.

All right, so it wouldn't be that bad, but it would be absolute hell to drive in. Yes, it would.

He was thinking about how, for once, he was glad Dean would hardly ever let him drive the beloved Impala when he came close to breaking teeth on Monique's golf bag (which was, on a light note, close to twice her size. It was a wonder the woman didn't fall flat on her arse from the weight).

The train had stopped without a warning whistle, a holler, or any other type of warning to the caboose. So Sam had just kept on moving, which would have led to a very awkward scene with Ms. Red Flag if he was the kind to stare at his feet while he walked. But he didn't, and so he was spared a rather nasty encounter with one of the only people in his life he'd taken an almost instant dislike to. That was saying something, considering… well, considering everything.

YCO and the brothers Winchester were gathered around the back of the van. They were already starting to load up the golf bags, to run over a final and lightening quick revamp of the plans. Sam watched, deaf and mute, as the nose of one gun slid forward out of its plaid home and flirted perversely with the world.

He might have tried to make the point long ago that he didn't believe in omens. But that was before his dreams, his waking visions, and a seemingly peppy song that blasted through the Creeper Mobile's open windows the moment Chuck turned the ignition key.

Steve had just finished telling Dean what frequency the Nutter-Butters were on, on the walkie-talkie system, when a dance beat thought it was the right time to put in the final exclamation.

"_Lauft!"_ a man put simply over a Tranz Metal beat that made Steve's head start a-bobbing.

"_Weil der Meister uns gesandt. Verkünden wir den Untergang, der Reiter der Boshaftigkeit füttert sein Geschwür aus Neid — Neid — Neid — Neid" _and into something about the truth being like a thunderstorm, something something something, it comes to you to destroy. But Sam understood that first word, that "run!", very clearly.

He looked to Dean (meaning to give him a look equivalent to Lucy Ricardo's famous wail), and found that his brother thought then was the finest time to make a fool of himself. In short, he stood with his feet close enough together to move them in a synchronized back-and-forth motion, his torso turning in an opposite forth-and-back motion with his forearms to his chest and fists knocking to the dance beat. Then, oh heaven, _then_ he pumped his palms up into the air in sync with bending his knees to the bass drum.

Dean turned to his little brother and the stupid grin on his face disappeared. He cleared his throat and lowered his arms. He frowned and looked to Steve. "So ten, is it?"

Steve was smiling in amusement, his scar pinched into prominence and his false teeth glowing in the light of the van. It looked dark, evil, and otherwise unholy. "Yeah-huh."

It was vile to admit, but as Sam stared at that smile he felt an aching in his bladder—a twinge in his nether-regions—and felt a harsh childhood humiliation coming on strong. He smiled weakly at Steve and rushed onward toward the Impala, spindly legs rotating stiffly in awkward hip-sockets.

What did a guy have to do to fight an Incubus—an _Alp_, a _Follet_, a _Duende_—with a celery stick?

In his ear, a rifle laughed shrilly.

_"Just your sanity is all. But, hey, you'__re already halfway there."_

To prove the point of this, like his days weren't really bad enough, D'avianna Longhbrough appeared before him. She stood in front of the Impala's passenger door, munching on pieces of her baby's insides as if they were popcorn.

Another omen, of course. One Sam couldn't put off meeting beyond visions for very long.


	10. Ten

**Chapter Ten: New World Order**

_(the second hour brings no second chances)_

In the car, Sam sat with his elbow against the window, his fingers gingerly rubbing at the stitches in his forehead. The wound was puffy, and it stung something fierce for the first time since Sam had woken from his fainting spell. No doubt it was also bruised, but his thick, shaggy hair covered the top half of his face very well. No one had yet noticed the only physical evidence of Samuel Winchester's panic attack, of his romps with a certifiably insane mother, of his quick descent into the maelstrom of madness.

It wasn't as much fun as he thought it would have been, his emigration from sanity, but then again — had he ever expected flowers and puppy dogs, beer and skittles? No, not really. But run-ins with a crazy person who mutilated her own child and then tore off her own skin — that wasn't in the brochure either.

And neither was the conundrum Sam was in now, sitting in a vintage cherry and wondering what the hell had happened to his life. That had been answered within the first three minutes of the car ride, so since then he had been staring at the back of the Creeper Mobile in complete and total silence.

He hadn't mentioned the D'avianna incident to Dean, something that could have filled the endless miles to Wyandotte easy. There wasn't any music either, something that clearly grated on Dean's nerves. There was a grimace on his chiseled face, as if silence had sharp edges. But Monique had been trying to converse over the 'talkie system, and had complained three times about the music. It was too loud, first. It was still too loud, second. And, third, it was craptastically old.

"You still listen to that stuff?" she had asked, in a high-pitched whiny tone that overrode a rather loud rumble of thunder. "It's older than you are!"

Dean had laughed shortly, his jaw set, and turned down "All Along the Watchtower". Jimmi Hendrix and his magic fingers dulled away to the hum of tires against the back roads of Oklahoma.

Smiling as he pressed the communication button on the brothers' walkie-talkie he had said, "Classics" as calmly as he could muster. "Those are classics you're hearing, do — ear." Because if he had stuck with _doll face_ he would have found himself a rather violent visit from Chuck's fist.

"Whatever. I just think we should be able to hear you when you're talking."

Sam had looked to Dean, conveying through his eyes that she really just wanted to make sure neither one of them was saying anything they shouldn't, using the loud music as a type of cover. Like the walkie-talkies had been fixed to always remain in the on/communicating position.

Creepers didn't need to be that careful, either. At least not when it came to things outside of the flashlight beam.

Dean had nodded to Sam. To Monique and the rest of YCO, he had told them they were probably right. He'd keep the music down.

That had been at least fifteen minutes ago, nothing said between anyone since then. And it was beginning to get to Sam as well; the longer he stared at the butt of the van they were following, the more convinced he was that Steve was staring back at him through the tinted rear windows. Smiling, false teeth ablaze with all the light from Hell.

Sam shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He looked away from the windshield and behind his seat at The German rifles, lying across the backseat amongst the blatantly unused golf clubs. The guns struck him as filthy, not to mention evil, and he didn't want to have to use them.

"I don't think 'Nutty' was a strong enough word for them," he noted softly — as if he didn't that fixed walkie-talkie would deliver his words right to those Notherners, to Steve himself — the devil incarnate.

Dean looked from the black van he was closely following to the walkie-talkie sitting vigil before he and his brother. Its red light was blazing something eerie. "Come up with something better, then, College Boy. I've got nothing." He sighed, turning behind the Creeper Mobile onto the highway. "K-98 German Mausers. I didn't know wallpaper could be murderous."

"What are they up to?" Sam asked, looking warily at the blaring red light on the walkie-talkie, sitting rather modestly in the ashtray.

"I don't know. Whatever it is, it isn't good." His voice was a study in distraction, and for the first time in all his driving life Dean had two hands on the wheel. Shaking his head, he sighed as a muffled peal of thunder shook through the air. "Maybe they know who we are? They've decided to kill us, making it look like an accident on the road. You know how sports cars are in this kind of weather, Sammy."

In the parking lot of the Holiday Inn & Suites, the snowflakes had been back-lighted with beauty, with colors hand-picked by angels if one believed in such things. Now, driving down a highway in ever-thickening snow those puffy flakes were ashen gray. Like hope in the mouth of Death.

Sam frowned at himself for coming up with such imagery.

"I knew she had no idea what the hell she was talking about," Dean fumed. "This isn't New Yahrk, honey. We don't get snow around these parts, we get _snow_."

A strong gust of wind sent uncolored cotton candy bits crashing into the left side of the car. They made a _plink!_ing sound.

"Or, instead of ramming us off the road, they'll just walk us out in the middle of this storm when we get to the house and shoot us. And then that steroid freak'll run off with Bessy here."

Playing out this scene in his mind's eye, little baby Winchester was relatively sullen until the image of a cow-spotted Chevy popped into the movie. Not purring, but mooing. Trying to stifle his laughter, his giggles caught in his nose and went out sputtering.

"What?" Dean asked, harshly.

Sam bent forward in his seat, tittering so much his eyes began to water.

Haughtily, annoyed, Dean hissed at his brother. "For someone so disturbed, you sure do laugh a lot."

Tittering, Sam forced himself to speak. "I've always known you had named this car, but Bessy? Whatever happened to Roxanne?"

"That's her middle name," Dean stated casually. "Dad wouldn't let me change her first."

"Yeah, that makes perfect sense."

Dean stroked the steering wheel with his right palm, his eyes straining on the black van in front of him that was nigh lost in the thick downpour of snowflakes. Two black cars driving at night in a snow storm, what a quaint recipe for disaster. He sighed through clenched teeth.

Rubbing at his stitches again, Sam settled further into his seat. His stomach was tight, apprehension coursing through his veins like ice. Why had he agreed to do this? Why had he decided to talk his brother into coming to this house with the crazy YCO? Maybe it would have been better to the world if they had just moved on to Texas, let the house burn down to the ground the first Tuesday of next month.

The Killing Room would be gone then. Either true or false, it would be gone.

It was true when Dean had said that Sam had run home crying from school when he had first heard the story. The Killing Room had moved into the elementary school like the plague, like a thick green gas that settled over his head at lunchtime.

The sixth graders at the table in front of him, either to pass time or give them an excuse not to eat their noxious food, took to telling scary stories before they were allowed to leave for recess. The Hook, the story about the woman who ate her poodle, trivial things like that. But then Friday happened, Meatloaf Friday.

Sammy had been sitting at his usual table, in front of the theatre and behind that sixth grade table. He was in the midst of trying to yank his spork out of the inedible piece of meatloaf, unsuccessfully, when a loud-mouth boy began to laugh.

"_Have I got the story for you,"_ he had started. _"You're gonna piss your pants when I'm through with you."_

His friends had all laughed with him, telling him that he was full of himself. He had never scared them before and they doubted today marked the tide of change.

"_My cousin out in Oklahoma told me about this. It gave me nightmares."_

Someone had said, _"The easter bunny gives you nightmares."_

"_Shut it, and listen._

"_So there's this house in Oklahoma, right? A mansion, huge and old and just sitting at the end of a gravel road. The windows are all open sores, right? The floors are all covered in mold from the rain coming in through the glassless windows. There's even a tree growing up the side of the foy-er, twisting up the staircase. The wallpaper's rolling off the walls, the pictures can't be seen 'cause they're covered in years of dust and grit. The furniture's there, too. Every last stick of furniture, the owner's just up and left years ago and left all their crap behind._

_But that's not the best part. The best part is why they left._

_See, back in the day the house was a plantation. There was this slave girl who worked in the house, cleaning up after her folks and shit. She was a pretty little thing, like Halle Barry or somebody, and the warden guy really liked that. _Really_. When his wife was away into town, or whenever she wasn't looking, he'd had a ron-der-voo with the slave girl. Eventually she got knocked up, right? So she told her boss man that she was gonna have his baby and he flipped out. He grabbed her and he dragged up to the attic, then a few floors beyond that. He threw her into this tiny room with no windows. Standing room only, that's how small it was. He locked her in and kept her there for nine months, feeding her table scraps when he felt like it. _

_And then one day… he came up the stairs and he unlocked the door."_

Someone scoffed. _"Oh, no. He unlocked the door."_

"_Yeah, he unlocked the door and he saw here lying on the floor dead. He walked into the room, and then he died."_

"_Weak!" _his friends all insulted in unison. _"Weak!"_

The storyteller moaned. _"I ain't done yet!"_

He huffed and continued on, annoyed but trying not to show it. _"So he walks into the room thinking she's dead, right? Still holding the moldy old scraps of leftover bread and soup. He walks in and sees her lying there on the floor — "_

He had paused, desperately attempting to instill a little bit of suspense in his poorly executed horror story.

"— _with her skin shore clean off and blood all around her, the baby on the floor in a pool of blood next to her."_

There was silence, either because his audience had been finally stunned into silence (unlikely) or they were giving him cynical looks that would have been ruined if they had spoken.

"_So he drops the food and leans over to her, right? And he sees that the baby's been skinned to, but he can't see no skin around anywhere — there's just dust on the floor. So he's leaning down and looking at his dead baby, when — BLAM!_

"_The slave girl jumps over at him, bleeding all over him from where her skin should have been. She claws at his face, her own skin hanging from her teeth and her eyes red like she had peeled the skin off 'em like grapes. She kills him and eats him and then finally dies."_

The sixth grade Stephen King wannabe had sighed peacefully.

"_But she never really left that room at the top of the stairs, The Killing Room. She's still in there, and she's still angry. She kills anyone who goes into that attic room at night, peels their flesh right off and eats it like lasagna."_

That had been the story, bad as it was, yet it had still scared ten years off of little Sammy's life. He had met Dean in the bus line that afternoon after school, jittery and shaking. He had begun to sob when Dean asked him "What's eating you?" and hadn't stopped until his body had simply run out of water to make tears. For two days Sammy had had sleepless nights, screaming out to Daddy that the slave girl was coming for him, and for another seven the story snaked its ways through the classroom hallways.

Even now, with so many years set between him and that Meatloaf Friday incident, his stomach unconsciously tensed at the mere mention of lasagna. Of course, after he had now seen D'avianna Longhbrough and had been handed her mutilated baby, lasagna was now all the more a correct description. She peeled off skin like those wide egg noodles, revealing beneath the ribbed red structure of muscles and tendons beneath.

Sam yowled low in his throat, suddenly seeing — thankfully through his mind's eye, or so he hoped — the slave girl's baby in his lap. It was as he had seen it when his mother had handed him his younger self in his blacked out psychosis: wrapped tightly in a blue blanket (_Sam's_ blue blanket, the one with the teddy bear swinging the baseball bat and his name embroidered like a brand name on that wooden stick). Only this time, there was actually no baby — just a blob of undercooked lasagna, the tomato sauce staining the cotton of the blanket an orange-y red.

He yelled something inaudible and waved his hands, sending the image back into oblivion.

"Sammy?" Dean asked, his voice strangely fragile like glass. "Sammy, what's wrong?"

The youngest Winchester turned his head to look at his brother, the only thing he had left in the world, and opened his quivering mouth to speak. Only a shaking blubber escaped his clenched throat.

Dean, trying really hard to see both the road in the blinding storm and that his baby brother didn't throw himself out of the moving car, furrowed his forehead. This was a feat, seeing as how the creases in his skin had been five inches deep since the blowing snow had picked up intensity.

Taking the risk that the walkie-talkie actually had been bugged and the YCO could hear every word spoken in the Impala, Dean transitioned himself into Big Brother mode.

"Talk to me, Sammy, and when I say 'talk' I don't mean giving me the roundabout. You're going to spill your guts and you're going to do it right here, right now."

Sam's throat opened, but he found that he could only recite a line from a song he had heard a very long time ago. "'If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower.'"

Dean's forehead receded further into his skull. "The hell is that supposed to mean? Lawn mower — Sammy?"

He blinked. "I… Everything's going away, going back to a simpler time when everything was nothing but flowers and mountains and rivers. I think I'm going crazy Dean — my Pizza Hut's being covered with Daises."

"Well if you talk like that…." But he stopped himself. Insane as his little Sammy was speaking, now was not the time to make fun. "But why?"

"Why?" Sam repeated, as if the word had the most peculiar sound and he needed to hear it again to marvel at the word's strangeness.

Dean nodded, eyes like sandpaper as he tried to home in on the YCO van's white license plate. "Why is this all connected and why is it screwing with your head so much? The visions at the Dairy Queen, meeting these freaks —" he nodded his chin toward the van "— the craziness in the motel bathroom that clearly hasn't gone away. Why has it leeched itself on to you? Why are you seeing this cannibal chick? Why?"

"I'm a lightning rod," Sam replied simply.

Dean was shocked to find himself rolling his eyes. "Yes."

And then he thought it hit him like a ton of bricks, or a baseball thrown at ninety miles per hour, or a six pound sack of flour, or a dandelion struck across his cheek. Then it became nothing more than a guess.

"They know that something is in that house, hence the guns. But that needs not be stated. Steve, that tiny freak show, is at the base of all this. I think."

"I _know_." Sam could, in fact, see a set of gleaming teeth through the dark glass at the back of the van. "The other two might be creepers, idiots who want to arm themselves against the unexpected teenage couple with raging hormones and a crack addiction worse than Barry Bonds's steroid habit. But Steve…."

Dean chewed on his lower lip. "Doesn't explain your visions of a loopy servant girl and her illegitimate child. Unless this all an omen, but why would she torment you with meetings with Mom if this was all a warning that an off the handle Yankee with a scar on his upper lip is up to something dubious?"

Sam shrugged. "Why'd you see the list in the Dairy Queen?"

"My momentary lapse of sanit — er…."

"It's all right. I know in a short while I'll be in the hospital where you'll come visit twice a month with chicken soup and homemade fudge."

Dean sighed. "My problem doesn't count. We're freaking out about you right now."

"Uh-huh."

"Yeah."

Then there was a thick silence, one only broken by occasional sighs and clicking tongues. And the crackle of static over the walkie-talkie.

"We're almost there guys," Monique said. "We're turning off the highway now. Over." And sure enough, the van's break lights came on, the right turn signal, and the YCO turned off onto a rural road piling up deep with drifting snow.

Dean continued to follow the van, not bothering to press the button on the walkie talkie when he said, "Yes. Almost there. Almost into the mouth of the devil."

"Okay," Sam said slowly. "Maybe this _is_ an omen. I'm like Odd Thomas and his floating black bogies."

"Who?"

Sam shook his head. "I'm seeing D'avianna — "

"Girl needs an easier name to pronounce."

"— because she wants us to know that something terrible is going to happen at that house? Something that's going to make her double-maybe-triple homicide seem like a Disney movie. Something that she's clearly going to enjoy very much."

Dean frowned in thought.

"Your little list at the Dairy Queen was a list of the dead, also something that needs not be stated. D'avianna was the first, you said, her child the second, and on from there. A list of all that have died in The Killing Room. Were YCO on it? They gave us no last names, yeah, but Monique and Chuck should have stood out. The should have been at the end."

Dean had been afraid of that question. He had figured, rather stupidly, that because of all that Sam had been going through that that question wouldn't have been brought up until _after_ they had left 687 Belmont Avenue for good.

"They were."

And that was the God's honest truth, so just as long as Sammy didn't ask if _their_ names had been listed….


	11. Eleven

It's horrible and I'm so sorry for that. But at least it's something.

**Chapter Eleven: Speechless and Redundant**

When, all those hours ago, Sam had dozed off into his cheeseburger, Dean sat around in the booth for only three minutes. Three long and arduous minutes he sat staring at the nappy head of his baby brother, silently contemplating whether or not it would be a good idea to wake the kid up. They were on a schedule after all, lallygagging was not allowed. Nor were nightmares for that matter, vicious nightmares that were liable to cause a vast amount of unwanted attention, and the last thing that anyone needed was unwanted attention.

But Sammy seemed to be so peaceful, so innocently demure of any terrors that Dean simply left his brother to sleep in front of his soggy French fries. Not wanting to make a whole lot of noise that would wake Sam up, Dean left his brother alone to saunter over to the registers. Traveling to an old, abandoned Corpus Christi railroad plagued by a demonic train really burned up the calories.

The pimple-faced cashier was already turning away from the fry cook – and his fascinating conversation about Clearasil – to acknowledge Dean when the elder man cleared his throat rather rudely. The kid didn't look so happy to be working at a fast food joint so late into the evening, and the lack of excitement was all the more evident in his voice.

"Help you?" he asked, angry red volcanoes disappearing into the folds around his mouth as words formed.

Dean smiled awkwardly, remembering his own adolescent days spent hunched over the sink with rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs and his two most trusted fingers. He hoped to God looking at this kid, who must have just come on shift somewhere between the time Dean had ordered the Winchesters' evening meal and came back for an ice cream cone – looking at him wouldn't make Dean break out in wild patches of acne.

The kid still stared with droopy, grey eyes and a violently red frown at Dean. He rubbed at his chin with the side of his right hand and for a moment Dean was utterly horrified. Let this punk handle his ice cream cone? No way, José! He wasn't going to chance contracting a rather severe bought of pimples through cross-contamination with a kid's greasy, acne-laden hand and a sugar cone.

He opened his mouth to speak, was going to ask if Fry Boy back there by the stoves playing Beef Patty Hockey could take his order instead, when the grip of terror loosened its hold. "Just a twist ice cream cone, my good man."

"Size?" the kid – "Gerald" proclaimed his gleaming white name tag – asked with a horrible lack of enthusiasm.

"La – " Dean began and then stopped, looking over his shoulder at the crumpled form of Sleeping Sammy. Better let the kid get his rest without a whole lot of slurping. "Small," he amended, his voice as plagued with disappointment as his cashier.

Up-nodding, Gerald punched a few keys on the only open register and asked for a rather stately sum for an ice cream cone. Dean handed him a twenty dollar bill and got his change back with a scowl and a forceful thrust. Several dimes clattered to the floor, one bouncing off Dean's left boot and another tinkling to a stop somewhere behind him.

With a cross sigh Dean bent down to retrieve his dropped currency, dirt and grime scraping against his fingertips. He scowled. If it didn't cost so much to fill his Baby with gasoline every ten miles he wouldn't be bothering with twenty cents. But bothering with twenty cents he was and so he set about scrabbling about the grungy floor like a crab to retrieve his change.

The first dime was easy enough to get to, having fallen under the soda machine beside Acne Boy's register, but the second was a rebel without a cause. When dropped it had bounced off Dean's right boot toe and rolled across the restaurant to the coolers, where it met up with a used piece of chewing gum. The gum, judging by the color of course Dean Winchester was no heathen, the stick of chewy sugar was Double Mint and atrociously sticky. It would not let Dean's shiny, 1995 dime go, the spot of change was held fast in the germ-ridden depths of gum and required that Dean use enough force in his tug to smash his knuckles against the bottom of the refrigerated display case. But at least he had his dime back.

Smiling, Dean pocketed his change and stood up on cracking knees. A quick glance in the glass, despite a weak reflection, proved that the ordeal had not damaged Dean's facade at all.

Dean could not afford for his good-looking, brutish armor to become so much as tarnished. People could not ever see what lied beneath the surface, because if they did… Dean didn't have to worry about that, his armor was perfectly intact.

Confident in his ongoing charade as an insensitive fool without a care in the world, Dean turned and walked back to the counter. Gerald was still making the ice cream cone, turning the caramel-colored sugar wafer slowly around and around. Perfection took time, obviously.

Anxious to get away from the acne-faced cashier, desperate to not get infected with a break-out himself, Dean huffed silently and shoved his hands into the pocket of his jeans. He looked back into the kitchen to watch the cook play with frozen beef patties, but the cook was no longer by the stove. The cook wasn't anywhere for that matter, just seemed to disappear into the belly of the Dairy Queen.

Dean hoped the cook wasn't doing anything immoral, anything that would slap a Department of Health citation on the door so fast the paper would smoke.

Twisting his face into a mask of disgust, the eldest Winchester brother resumed the study of Gerald's back – which was scrawny, even for a teenager. The shoulder blades pushed against the fabric of the kid's work shirt in awkward, almost anorexic-like angles. Either the kid really was harboring an eating disorder, or he was one of those talentless species of school children who couldn't even walk without tripping over their own two feet. Dean could clearly see this, too – see Acne Boy walking to the drive-thru window and suddenly, with the sparkling flare only accident-prone people can produce, fall flat on his face.

The blonde started to laugh at this image of a fellow human being falling down, delighted in the fact that he could laugh after everything he and Sammy had been through lately, when he felt a sudden urge to look up. It wasn't even really like an urge, either, because an urge is felt. This, though… Dean just looked up. He didn't know why, it was just one of those things people did without thinking about it. He lifted his head and there he was, staring up at the menu board.

Just a plain Dairy Queen menu board that resembled the how many millions of others across the country, the world – the Midwest. Just another menu board, changing on its own accord. No, not so much changing in the sense of metamorphism but in the sense that all the letters were being rearranged by an unseen set of hands. Every last letter, too, as well as the numbers. Gone were the cheeseburgers and chicken strip baskets, gone were the Cokes and Sprites and apple juice. Gone gone gone was anything feasible, anything normal.

The large black letters were being shuffled around like a deranged person who just lost big at Scrabble. They went back and forth and up and down, here and there and everywhere in a dizzying display that much resembled a swarm of flies against a window. It was odd, creepy even, and would have sufficed in giving Dean an excuse to leave this restaurant had it not gotten creepier.

The menu's numbers and letters hadn't just rearranged themselves, but did so in a manner that resulted in entirely English wording.

"GRAHAM MANSI0N" proclaimed the centered top line, the letter "O" being a zero. That was uneasy enough, a name that struck a cord somewhere deep down within Dean and brought flying up like a giant beach ball held beneath the water and suddenly let go, an image of a young Sammy standing by the bus line after school with a look about him that screamed "ESCAPED INMATE OF CRAZY FARM, SKIPPED OUT ON HIS LOBOTOMY".

And then, of course, Dean asked his brother what the hell had been eating him and all hell had broken loose. Dams buckled under the weight of all the water they were forced to hold back and Sammy cried – more than that, sobbed and weeped and wailed – had been completely inconsolable until – _poof!_ – the kid stopped, plum ran out of water.

So the house with the so-called Killing Room was now the new title for the menu board, creepy as sin in its own right, but then Dean saw what was below it. A list. A very long list of names that began with the horribly unpronounceable name of D'avianna – was it "Dee-ay-vee-anna" or was it "Dave-ee-ah-nah" or some combination of both? – and stretched on for three columns, abridged by the look of it, and ended with something that chilled Dean to the core.

Right beneath the name of Steven O'Dell were small black letters and numbers that spelt Samuel and Dean "W1NCH3STER". It had all the charm of an Instant Messaging session with a tween girl from hell.

Reeling back in shock and fright, understanding nothing, Dean looked back across the counter. His ice cream cone was being held up by Eeyore incarnate with a paralyzingly bored expression on his face, one curling around the edges with suspicion.

"Not that I have anything better to do than hold this for you all night…."

Calm Dean could not be. He grabbed the ice cream cone from Acne Boy's hands and shuffled back to the booth his brother was zonked out in. He sat choking down the ice cream, his throat pinched and unwilling to accept dairy products. Gerald went home by the time Dean finished his ice cream cone, the boy's face constricted in confusion, the red volcanoes writhing in their skin crease canyon prisons.

The rest Sammy knew: Dean left in a daze to gather provisions in the convenience store and at the Little Debby end cap overhead a small group of people with silly accents talking about the very place that had been made into the title of the Dairy Queen's menu board, which had since returned to normal.

But, sitting there in the Impala trying to drive through a winter storm, Dean really didn't want to have to say anything else to Sammy regarding the Diary Queen incident and Sammy could tell.

Since his recitation of Talking Heads lyrics and his theories revolving around this whole screwy plot with YKO, Little Man hadn't said much of anything. He had the road map open in his lap, one hand rubbing at the stitches in his forehead and the other tracing along the road they were taking. He sighed and lifted his head to look out of the windshield.

The snow was thick, accumulating and mounting and drifting furiously as thundersnow had a tendency to do. Monique was from Rhode Island, it was tragically comical her lack of blizzard knowledge.

"We should be there very soon," Sam said. "Assuming, of course, we don't veer off into a snowdrift – a tree – and get ourselves killed."

"Nice way to go," Dean replied into the windshield. He was leaning over the steering wheel, squinting through the heavy curtains of snow. "Better than _geist_s any day."

The walkie talkie crackled and hissed. "Exciting, isn't it?" Steve's voice was positively giddy, quite possibly from the notion of getting killed while driving through a blizzard. A little disembowelment here, a little beheading over there….

"Exciting isn't even the half of it, buddy."

Sam waited for the devil with the false teeth answer, despite neither brother pressing the button when Sam spoke – he just expected it to happen, for the man with the scar on his lip to hear.

He didn't, though. Instead Steve's shrill and convulsive laugh snapped and crackled and popped through the walkie-talkie. "It's just down this driveway up here. At least I _think_ there's a driveway up here."

Which was an interesting statement – Sam could barely see the van's taillights through the snow anymore, but Steve could see a driveway? He let the map crease in his lap as he leaned forward, straining his eyes to see through the veils of harsh white flakes. Then, suddenly, he sat back.

"Something wrong, Sammy?"

Sammy looked back out the window, his forehead creased in a kind of scared concentration. His cut screamed whereas he voice could not. His throat was locked.

In the distance, hardly rising out of the horizon yet, was the vast structure of a house. It was in horrible disrepair, sagged toward the east as most ill-kept houses tend to do in one direction or another. Sam could tell all of this because, much to his shock and dismay, there was a strong yet milky yellow light radiating from a window on what might have been the attic floor.

Someone had left the lights on for them.


End file.
